“Why Doesn’t Google Know How Important I Am?”

Monday, July 21st, 2008 | Lawyer Marketing

While no one has ever used those exact words, I do often hear from attorneys who are frustrated that their own websites show up lower on Google searches than the websites of other, less experienced attorneys. I once even received a call from a non-client who was angry that my client was coming up #1 on a search for Immigration Attorneys. For some reason he felt the need to tell me off and let me know that HE was a much more accomplished attorney than my client, and that it was wrong that his site didn’t come up first in the search. (Sadly, he was so angry he refused to meet with me to discuss his own site.)

One of the analogies I like to use when first meeting with a potential client is the Library Analogy. To explain how Google works we ask the attorney to think of the Internet as a vast library and Google as the librarian. Continuing the analogy, we ask the attorneys to think about how Google the librarian decides what “books to pull from the shelf.” Obviously if you don’t have a book (website) or if that book isn’t filed correctly (SEO, etc), your not going to show up very high in the results. The “library analogy” has really helped many of our clients grasp why it is not only important to build a website, but to build one the right way.

And yet, it dawned on me this weekend that as much as I like the “Library Analogy”, it still comes up short in explaining how important it is to build a website the right way. That being said, it is still the best analogy we have, as nothing really compares to either the amount of data Google has in its reference or to the method at which it gets dispersed.

I was catching up on last month’s WIRED MAGAZINE and read Editor Chris Anderson’s article on THE PETABYTE AGE. The first thing that jumped out at me was the fact that Google processes 1 PETABYTE of data every 72 minutes. To put that in perspective, the entire printed volumes at the US Library of Congress take up about 10 Terabytes, which is 1/100th of a Petabyte. That is a staggering amount of data.

The other thing that jumped out at me was the concept that Google doesn’t “know” anything. As Anderson says, “Google can translate languages without actually “knowing” them (given equal corpus data, Google can translate Klingon into Farsi as easily as it can translate French into German). And…it can match ads to content without any knowledge or assumptions about the ads or the content.”

Most relevantly, he points out that “Google’s founding philosophy is that we don’t know why this page is better than that one: If the statistics of incoming links say it is, that’s good enough. No semantic or causal analysis is required.”

And so, it is not really that Google doesn’t know how important you are, it is that they neither need nor care to know it. Google merely uses applied mathematics to sort through its huge mass of data, and so far that has ruled the day. Might this change in the future? I suppose it could, particularly with growth of reviews that are included in things like Google Local. But even reviews don’t convey stature, so I think for the foreseeable future this will not be part of the equation.

What I am certain of is that if you want to grow your business using the Internet, it is more important than ever to have the guidance of an Internet Marketing professional. There are just too many moving parts and the system is too complicated to do this on your own, particularly if you are practicing law full time.

If you’d like help with your law firm site, please contact me via my website at http://www.losangeles-lawyer-marketing.com/.

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