Law Firm SEO Scam: How "Off-Site SEO" Vendors Hijack Your Brand

1. The Pitch

A note on the names. To keep the parties anonymous, this article describes the scheme as it would apply to a hypothetical firm we will call Acme Law Firm in Houston, Texas. The actual vendor we investigated runs an identical templated network targeting other law firms in other states. The city, the state, and the firm name in this article are illustrative substitutes. The architectural facts, the patterns of damage, and the observations from older client portfolios inside the vendor's network are what we documented in the real investigation.

Imagine you have hired a lead-generation vendor for your law firm in Houston, Texas. You operate as Acme Law Firm. Your website has been around for thirteen years. It targets car-accident cases in the markets you serve.

The vendor's pitch is straightforward. They will run SEO on your behalf, bring you signed cases, and you will only pay per case. If they do not deliver leads, you pay nothing. If they do deliver leads, you pay only when the case closes.

The math sounds clean. The risk reads as zero. This is exactly what you were looking for.

The rest of this article walks through what the vendor is actually doing under that pitch, in eleven discrete steps. By the end you will see why no per-case-billed off-site SEO program is structurally capable of doing anything other than the scheme described here.

2. What the Vendor Actually Builds

The vendor operates a national network of about fifty templated websites. Each site belongs to a different, unrelated law firm client of theirs. Every site in the network deals in the same vertical, car accidents, and every site targets the same kind of keyword in the same city as the firm whose name appears on it.

That last part is where Google's policy violation begins. From Google's point of view, you are now operating two websites. Your real website at AcmeLaw.com targets car-accident searches in Houston. The vendor's microsite, on a state-based exact-match domain along the lines of autoaccidentlawyerstate.com, also targets car-accident searches in Houston, with your name and address on every page. Same vertical. Same city. Same keywords. Two websites.

Google's spam policy explicitly prohibits a single business operating multiple sites targeting the same keywords. You are now in violation, even though you did not build the second site. Your name is on it, so the violation attaches to you, not just to the vendor.

The vendor itself is incorporated and operating from a different state entirely than any of the law firms whose names appear on the network. The physical separation is intentional. It is how the vendor builds and maintains fifty templated sites publishing fifty firms' addresses without ever encountering any of the firms in person.

Every site in the network uses the same HTML scaffold, the same color scheme, the same page structure, the same internal link pattern, and the same content template. The only things that change site to site are:

• The firm name plastered on every page
• The firm's street address in the schema and the footer
• The firm's phone number in the header (often a vendor-controlled tracking number)
• The state and city in the URL, the H1, and the location-specific copy

Every site targets the same kind of keyword: state-plus-practice-area and city-plus-practice-area combinations. Every page is filled with AI-generated content that has been lightly spun to avoid pure duplicate-content flags. None of it is original. None of it is useful to a human reader. None of it could rank on its own merits.

The most damaging discovery was on the content layer. The vendor scraped the firm's actual attorney biography pages directly off the firm's own website and republished them on the microsites word for word. The attorney bios, the credentials, the bar admissions, the case results, the photo captions, all of it, sat on a domain the firm did not own, with no canonical tag pointing back to the firm's real bio, no rewriting, no attribution.

And here is the part that goes beyond a duplicate-content problem. The attorneys whose bios appeared on the Texas-targeted microsites were not even licensed to practice in Texas. The vendor pulled bios from attorneys at firms in other states and republished them as if they handle car-accident cases in Houston. A Houston consumer who reads the bio, calls the listed number, and starts an intake conversation is being routed to representation from a lawyer who cannot legally appear in an Texas court. That is a bar advertising violation and a consumer-protection problem stacked on top of every other piece of damage in this scheme.

Google's duplicate-content systems see two identical copies of the same attorney bio published on two different domains and have to decide which one is the canonical source. There is no guarantee the firm's real domain wins that decision. In several cases we observed, the vendor's domain was treated as the canonical source for the bio, and the firm's own attorney page was demoted as the duplicate.

There is also a structural risk in the network's templated uniformity. The fifty sites share the same HTML scaffold, the same hosting infrastructure, the same NAP fingerprint pattern, and the same AI-spun content style. Any competitor of any of the firms on that network can identify the cluster from a single page-source view and report it to Google for doorway-page abuse.

Google's spam team investigates one site, traces the templated fingerprint across the network, and applies a manual action against the entire cluster. Every firm on the network goes down at the same time. You did not file the report. You did not even know the other forty-nine firms existed. You still take the penalty.

When we ran the vendor's footprint through reverse-WHOIS and pattern-match crawls, we found seven older client microsites in the same network that were already showing the damage patterns described in the rest of this article. In one of those portfolios, the vendor's microsite was returning on page one of the brand-name SERP next to the client firm's own real domain. In two others, the vendor's site had moved into ranking positions for localized non-branded searches in small and mid-size markets where the client firm's own real website did not appear at all.

In one older client's portfolio, the vendor's Google-facing description had introduced a single-letter typo into the firm's name, presenting the firm in the local entity graph as a slightly different brand at the firm's correct address. The misnamed record was sitting inside Google's local graph for over a year before anyone noticed.

3. The Authority Gap

The vendor's brand-new microsite has zero domain authority. Domain authority is something a website earns over years through bar listings, directory citations, press mentions, client reviews, and Google's slow, accumulative process of recognizing a brand as legitimate.

Your real website at AcmeLaw.com has been earning that authority for thirteen years. You appear on Avvo, Justia, FindLaw, your state bar's website, local press coverage, and the Houston legal directories. Google's entity graph has known your firm for over a decade. Every backlink, every citation, every press mention, every review has compounded into a level of authority no competitor can build in a quarter.

The vendor's microsite starts at the bottom of that ladder. By every conventional measure, it is invisible. It would take that microsite years of legitimate content production to rank against established Houston firms for a competitive head keyword like car accident lawyer Houston.

The vendor knows this. They are not actually trying to rank for those head keywords. The economics of per-case billing do not give them years to build authority. So they pick a different ranking target, the one race where the vendor has a structural chance of winning.

4. The Real Target Is Your Brand Name

The vendor aims for your business name.

They populate the microsite with your name, your address, and your phone number on every page. They generate AI-spun content for cities you serve, Houston, Sugar Land, The Woodlands, Pearland, and target city-plus-practice-area keywords that overlap with the searches your real site already wins. None of the content is original. None of it is useful to a reader. But it does not need to be. The microsite exists to publish your brand entity, repeatedly, on a domain the vendor controls.

This is brand hijacking. The vendor is not trying to out-rank you for car accidents. They are trying to age their templated microsite into the brand-search SERP that you have spent thirteen years building, so that consumers searching for Acme Law Firm see two results at the top of the page: yours and theirs.

Their domain ranking for your name is the only ranking outcome the vendor's economics will support. It is the only race they can win, because your brand name is structurally unique in your market. There is exactly one Acme Law Firm in Houston. The race for your brand has only one legitimate competitor in it: you.

Search Minneapolis Made and this website comes up in position one for exactly the same reason: this site has owned the name for decades and Google's entity graph already knows the firm. The vendor's job for the next twelve months is to age their microsite into the same kind of brand-search position next to your real site.

5. "But If I Show Up Twice, Isn't That Good?"

You may think to yourself, well, what is the problem? If I show up twice on the first page of Google for my own brand, the second result is just more visibility. How is that bad?

Here is how it is bad.

Consumers cannot tell which result is the real Acme Law Firm. Both have your name on the page. Both have your address. Both look like legitimate official answers to the search. Is the real firm at acmelaw.com or at autoaccidentlawyerstate.com? The consumer does not know.

Many click the wrong one. They fill out the form on the vendor's microsite. The lead enters the vendor's intake center. The vendor passes the intake back to you. If the case signs, you owe the vendor a per-case fee.

The vendor counts those signed cases as cases they produced, even when the consumer was searching specifically for your firm by name and would have found your real website if the vendor's microsite had not been stacked alongside it in the SERP. The consumer who searched Acme Law Firm after seeing your name on a sports stadium banner did not encounter your brand because of the vendor. They encountered it because you paid for the banner.

The consumer who searched after hearing your name from a referral did not encounter your brand because of the vendor. They encountered it because of your reputation.

The consumer who searched after seeing your business card at a community event did not encounter your brand because of the vendor either.

6. The Goodfellas Reality: Every Marketing Channel You Run Now Belongs to the Vendor

Once a vendor's microsite ages into your brand-search results, every dollar you spend on marketing and every reputation asset you have ever built turns into the vendor's revenue.

The mechanic is the same for every channel. A consumer encounters your business name somewhere, the next thing they do is search for it, the search returns a page that includes the vendor's microsite, the consumer clicks, fills out the form, signs a case, and the vendor invoices you for the lead.

• Ran a TV commercial. Viewer remembers your name, opens their phone, searches it, lands on the vendor's site, fills out the form. "F*** you... pay me!"
• Cut a radio spot. Driver hears your firm on the morning commute, searches at the next red light, lands on the vendor's site, calls the listed number. "F*** you... pay me!"
• Bought a highway billboard. Passenger types your name into Google before the next exit, lands on the microsite, taps the click-to-call. "F*** you... pay me!"
• Sponsored a local sports team, a charity 5K, or a community theater. Anyone who saw the firm's name on the jersey or the program later searches it, lands on the vendor's site, books the consult. "F*** you... pay me!"
• Got a referral from a past client. Friend hears "call Acme Law Firm, they handled my case," types it into Google, ends up on the vendor's site. "F*** you... pay me!"
• Got a referral from another attorney. Same path. "F*** you... pay me!"
• Earned organic Google reviews visible across Avvo, Justia, FindLaw, Yelp, and your Google Business Profile. Searcher reads the reviews, searches the firm by name, lands on the vendor's site. "F*** you... pay me!"
• Wrote a book chapter, gave a CLE keynote, sat for a podcast interview, or appeared on a local news segment about a verdict. Listener or viewer searches you afterward. "F*** you... pay me!"
• Built a thirty-year reputation as the firm people in town call after a serious accident. Adult child of that household searches your name on behalf of their parent. "F*** you... pay me!"

The vendor did not generate any of that demand. Your firm did. Your TV budget, your radio budget, your billboard budget, your sponsorship budget, your reputational equity, your decades of word-of-mouth referrals, your reviews, your earned press, your community involvement, every one of those is the channel feeding the vendor's tollbooth. The vendor inserted themselves between the consumer and your front door, and they bill you per case for letting you receive the demand your own marketing produced.

7. How the Damage Spreads: GMB, AI Search, Maps, and the Knowledge Graph

Everything described so far happens inside Google's main organic search results, the brand-search SERP your firm is competing for and losing percentage points on every month. The harder problem, and the one that is doing the most durable damage in 2026, is that the scheme spreads outward from Google's blue links into every other platform consumers actually use to find a business. None of those platforms read contracts. They read the open web, and the open web now has the firm's name and address published on fifty templated domains the vendor controls.

Google Business Profile (GMB) and the Local Pack. Google's local algorithm treats Name, Address, and Phone (NAP) consistency as a meaningful trust signal in the Local Pack. Whitespark's 2026 Local Search Ranking Factors panel frames it as consistency beats volume — the old directory-blitz playbook is outdated, but inconsistent NAP across a known network of templated sites still destabilizes the firm's local entity record. Fifty microsites publishing the firm's name with a vendor-controlled tracking number, or a slightly mangled firm name, or the firm's correct address paired with the wrong phone, poison the firm's NAP graph almost immediately.

Google's GBP system flags the firm's profile for inconsistent NAP. In severe cases the profile is suspended outright, which costs the firm three to six weeks of Local Pack visibility plus the manual reinstatement work. Even when suspension is avoided, the firm's Local Pack ranking degrades because the local algorithm's confidence in which NAP record is canonical has dropped.

AI search (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, Bing Copilot, Claude). Generative AI search engines do not look up an answer at query time the way Google's blue links do. They build internal entity profiles by aggregating signals across the open web, weighted by source authority and statistical consistency. Fifty vendor microsites publishing the firm's name on a templated network outweigh the firm's correct information on one domain by fifty to one.

Within roughly ninety days of the network aging in, AI engines begin citing the vendor's microsite as the canonical source for the firm. When a consumer asks ChatGPT or Perplexity about the firm by name, the AI answer cites the vendor's domain. The consumer clicks the citation, lands on a templated five-page site with no relationship to the firm's actual branding, fills out the contact form anyway, and the vendor collects the lead. The firm's real website is never displayed in the AI answer.

Maps platforms (Google Maps, Apple Maps, Bing Maps). Maps platforms ingest NAP data from the open web and the directory ecosystem. The fifty vendor microsites, each publishing a different firm's name at a different physical address, create a parallel local-business graph that competes with the firm's authentic Maps record.

In some cases Maps systems create duplicate listings, which the firm has to manually claim and remove. In others they downrank the firm's authentic listing for trust-score reasons, because the entity graph has fragmented into multiple competing records.

Directory ecosystem (Avvo, Justia, FindLaw, Yelp, Yellowpages, Foursquare, Bing Places, Apple Maps Connect). Local directories crawl the open web and either auto-update existing listings or auto-create new ones from what they find. The vendor's microsite NAP becomes a source the directories ingest.

Avvo's auto-claim system updates the listing to match the vendor's tracking number. Yelp inherits the vendor's intake address. FindLaw flags the firm's profile for inconsistent NAP and downranks it inside their internal trust score. None of this requires the vendor to attack the directories. It happens by gravity, because the vendor's footprint outweighs the firm's.

Google's Knowledge Graph. Google builds entity profiles by consensus across thousands of sources. Once Google has been told fifty times that the firm's phone number is the vendor's tracking number, or that the firm's name is something slightly different, Google's confidence in the correct information drops.

E-E-A-T and YMYL deterioration on your own website. Google's Search Quality Rater Guidelines use four pillars to evaluate any page: Experience (first-hand familiarity with the topic), Expertise (the skill and qualifications of the author), Authoritativeness (the reputation of the site within its field), and Trustworthiness (accuracy, transparency, and safety). Collectively called E-E-A-T, these pillars are applied with extra strictness to YMYL content, Your Money or Your Life, the category Google uses for topics that affect a person's health, financial stability, safety, or legal rights. Legal services are explicitly YMYL.

The vendor microsite scheme degrades all four pillars on your own real domain, even though you did not author a word of the vendor's content. The mechanism is brand-entity association. Google sees the firm's name and address published on fifty templated microsites with no first-hand experience, no original expertise demonstrations, no authoritative backlink profile, and no transparency about who authored the content. Those signals attach to the firm's brand entity. When Google then evaluates the firm's own real website, the brand entity it is evaluating has already been contaminated.

The damage flows in four parallel tracks. Experience signals degrade because the vendor's AI-spun content does not demonstrate any actual handling of the cases described. Expertise signals degrade because the scraped attorney bios sit alongside content claiming practice areas the attorneys may not be licensed in. Authoritativeness signals degrade because the firm's accumulated backlinks, citations, and press mentions are partially redirected through the entity graph toward the vendor's microsites instead of concentrating on the firm's own domain. Trustworthiness signals degrade because the NAP fragments across fifty sites, the canonical attorney bios live on a domain the firm does not own, and the contact form routes through a vendor intake center the consumer cannot identify as third-party.

Because legal content is YMYL, Google applies a stricter quality bar to your site precisely because the topic affects consumers' legal rights. The scheme drives E-E-A-T down through brand-entity contamination, then the YMYL classification amplifies the consequences by holding the now-degraded entity to a higher standard. Your own real website ranks lower for everything, not just for the brand-search hits the vendor is intercepting.

The firm's brand entity becomes a fragmented record in the Knowledge Graph, downranked for trust-score reasons, and the recovery requires enough fresh, correct signals to overwrite the contamination, which takes its own timeline regardless of how quickly the source content is scrubbed.

None of these systems read the vendor contract. None of them are bound by the per-case billing agreement. None of them stop ingesting the bad data when the firm terminates the engagement.

The contamination keeps propagating until the firm forces the vendor to remove the firm's name from every microsite, manually outreach every directory operator, and waits six to eighteen months for the AI engines to retrain on the corrected data. The cleanup is a multi-platform, multi-year project that runs entirely on the firm's dollar, while the AI systems consumers actually use to find businesses in 2026 keep returning the wrong answer.

8. The 18-Month Brand-Equity Transfer

The damage described in the previous sections does not all happen at once. It unfolds along a predictable eighteen-month curve, in four phases, each one setting up the next.

Months 0 to 3 — Build. The vendor registers the EMDs, stands up the templated city pages, and writes your firm's name, your address, and a phone number into every page. Search traffic from the microsites is essentially zero. You pay the vendor's onboarding fee or initial retainer. No cases have closed yet. Exit cost: near zero.

Months 3 to 6 — Early Ranking. Long-tail city pages begin ranking for low-competition phrases your main site does not yet target. The vendor's monthly report shows growth, the first per-case fees arrive, and you conclude the program is working. Many of those early leads were actually sourced externally by the vendor and routed through their intake center, but the report does not show that. The bait-and-switch covered in the next section explains how.

Months 6 to 12 — Brand-Search Migration. Because your firm's name appears on every microsite page, Google's entity systems start associating the vendor's domains with your brand entity. Brand searches like [firm name] [city] begin returning the vendor's microsite alongside your real domain. Per-case billing accelerates, but a growing share of those cases would have come through your firm's own marketing for free. Your main domain shows no growth in branded organic traffic, because the vendor's network is intercepting some of it.

Months 12 to 18 — Cannibalization and Lock-In. In thin small and mid-size markets, the vendor's microsite outranks your main domain on city-plus-practice-area searches. In the smallest markets, the microsite becomes your firm's only search presence. Per-case fees now consume budget that would otherwise have built location pages, reviews, and links on your firm's own domain. Internal advocates for the program point to its case volume as proof of ROI. Internal critics cannot prove how many of those cases the firm would have signed anyway, because the vendor controls the data.

Month 18 and beyond — Re-brand risk. If you try to leave, the vendor keeps the domains. And they do not just keep the URL. They keep the eighteen months of authority your firm's name built into that domain, the aged registration, the accumulated backlinks, the entity-graph associations to your brand, the NAP signals propagated across the directory ecosystem, and the brand-search trust score Google has been building toward the domain ever since your name was first stamped on it. All of that is baked into a domain registration the vendor controls.

Once you stop paying, the vendor strips your firm name out of the templates, plugs in the next firm's name in the same market that signs the next per-case contract, and points the aged authority your brand created at the new client's brand entity. The new client gets the equivalent of an eighteen-month head start in the brand-search SERP without doing any of the work. You paid for that head start, in cases, on the vendor's invoice, for a year and a half.

This is also probably how the vendor had aged domains available to pitch you in the first place. The domain we have been describing was almost certainly built originally with a different firm, then stripped and recycled when that firm stopped paying. The vendor's network is not really an SEO operation. It is a portfolio of recycled brand-search domains, leased out one firm per market at a time. The full hostage close, and the recycling cycle behind it, is the subject of Section 10.

9. The Bait-and-Switch: Why the First Six Months Look Like It's Working

Here is the part that catches firms off guard early in the engagement, and why the contract usually renews at the six-month mark even when the firm should have walked away.

At month two of a vendor engagement, the vendor's microsites are sixty days old. They carry zero domain authority. They rank nowhere meaningful for any keyword that a real human searches. They cannot be generating organic traffic at any volume. By every measurable signal, they are dead.

And yet the vendor's invoice shows signed leads. The firm closes cases. The monthly report looks healthy. The internal champion at the firm who signed the contract points to the case volume as proof of return on investment. The contract renews.

The leads are real. They just are not coming from where the vendor says they are.

The vendor sources leads externally during the early months of the engagement. They buy leads from lead-marketplace platforms, broker networks, paid ads run against generic queries, and rotating call-tracking numbers on totally unrelated domains. The cost per lead in those channels is predictable and small relative to the per-case fee the vendor charges. The vendor pays it, attaches a tracking number that routes through the vendor's intake center, and bills the firm a per-case fee as if the lead came from the new microsite the firm just paid to have built.

This is why the vendor insists on owning the intake. The vendor-controlled tracking layer is the only thing that lets the attribution fiction survive an audit. If the firm could see the source of each call directly, the externally-sourced leads would be visible inside thirty days and the attribution narrative would collapse.

The pattern typically runs for the first six to twelve months. The firm sees results, the contract renews, the firm becomes operationally dependent on the lead flow, and the firm has now budgeted around the vendor's per-case invoice as a recurring line item. Meanwhile, in the background, the actual asset the firm is funding is the vendor's slowly aging brand-search footprint, which by month twelve to eighteen has matured enough to start intercepting the firm's real brand searches.

Then the dynamic flips. The vendor's microsites finally rank for the firm's own brand. The vendor stops sourcing leads externally because the program is, finally, actually working. It is just not working on the keywords the original proposal promised. It is working on the firm's own name, intercepting demand the firm itself generated.

The firm was never paying for leads. The firm was paying for time. The vendor needed twelve months to age into the firm's brand entity, and the externally-sourced leads were the rent the vendor paid to keep the firm subscribed during the construction phase. Once the construction is complete, the rent is no longer necessary, because the asset is paid off, with cases, on the firm's dollar.

10. The Hostage Close: When You Stop Paying, the Vendor Keeps Everything

Suppose the firm eventually figures out what is happening and decides to terminate the contract. Here is what happens next.

The vendor still owns the domains. The firm's name is still on every page of every microsite. The vendor's portfolio of fifty templated domains is now an aged asset, ranking for the brand searches of the fifty firms whose names appear on them. The leads from those searches keep flowing through the vendor's intake center, which the vendor can now route to whichever competing firm in each market is willing to pay the per-case fee next.

The vendor's domain authority started at zero. The firm's domain authority was the product of thirty years of advertising, reviews, referrals, press, bar profiles, and citations. Through the structure of the contract, twelve to eighteen months of that accumulated authority was transferred from the firm's domain to the vendor's domain through brand-entity co-occurrence in Google's graph. On contract end, the vendor walks away with that asset. The firm walks away with nothing transferable.

The competing firm in the same market that the vendor now sells the domain to gets twelve months of aged authority for the price of a per-case fee. The original firm whose decades of brand-building generated that authority gets penalized for the trouble, because the vendor's domain is now a competitor in the same brand-search SERP the original firm used to own outright.

This is the part most firms do not understand until they try to leave. The vendor is not just renting you leads. They are renting you back access to your own brand demand, while quietly building a domain asset on your equity that they keep on the day you fire them. The longer the contract runs, the more valuable the asset becomes, and the more expensive it becomes to undo.

There is a sharper version of this hostage move that most firms never realize is happening. The vendor may have built this exact domain originally with a different client years ago. When that earlier client stopped paying, the vendor stripped the original firm's name out of the templates and replaced it with yours.

The leads that flow through the microsite during the early months of your engagement are not actually coming from your brand. They are coming from the leftover authority the previous client built, the leftover directory listings the previous client paid for, and ads the vendor is running on the side to keep the lead numbers credible while your brand entity ages into the SERP.

By the time you understand what is happening, your brand has been welded onto a portfolio of microsites the vendor has been recycling between law firms for years.

11. The Test

The right way to think about this entire scheme is to apply a single test. If you fire your web developer tomorrow, or fire your SEO consultant tomorrow, or stop investing in marketing entirely, who shows up on the first page of Google when consumers search for your firm by name?

If you have been doing SEO on your own domain, the answer is you. The ranking does not disappear when the marketing stops. Your name is structurally unique. Your domain has owned it for thirteen years. The authority lives where the pages live, which is on your domain.

If you have been paying a vendor to do off-site SEO on a domain they control, the answer is the vendor. The vendor still shows up for your brand. Their domain ranks for your name. Their domain captures the leads. The asset they built on your authority stays with them, and the only thing that changes is which firm in your market they sell it to next.

That is the test, stated as a question rather than a slogan. The brand-name ranking should belong to the company that owns the brand, not the company that was briefly hired to do marketing for it.

12. The Rule

No lead-generation vendor should ever do SEO using your business name on a domain they own.

All SEO work should live on your primary domain, the one you own and control. Every page that carries your business name should sit on a domain registered to your company.

The only thing a per-case-billed off-site SEO program can actually do is rank for your business name on a domain the vendor controls. That is the only race the vendor has a structural chance of winning. The competitive head keywords are out of reach. Your brand is the one keyword in the SERP that has no other legitimate competitor in it.

So the vendor's network of fifty templated microsites exists for one reason: to share the brand-name SERP with your real website, intercept some percentage of the consumers searching for you by name, and bill you per case for the clicks.

Whatever the vendor calls the program, microsite network, satellite sites, off-site SEO, local funnel, lead capture, per-case lead generation, the question that surfaces the real intent is one sentence long:

The Bottom Line

Never allow another company to run your business name on a secondary website to generate leads against your own website.

It does not matter how the contract is structured. It does not matter how the pricing model is structured. It does not matter how reputable the vendor sounds, or how transparent they appear to be about what they are building. The architecture is the problem, and no clause in any contract can fix it.

They own the domain. They can do whatever they want with it. If you stop paying, they keep it. They strip your firm's name out of the templates, they plug another firm's name in, and they hand all of the authority your brand spent eighteen months building on that domain to a competitor in your market. The domain stays valuable forever. Your role in making it valuable ends the day you fire the vendor.

And even if the contract sounds reasonable, even if the vendor seems legitimate, even if the per-case pricing model makes you believe the incentives are aligned, the program will not work the way you think it will. It will not build SEO for your firm. It will not produce a marketing asset you own at the end of the engagement. It will not produce most of the leads you pay for during the engagement either. What it will do is destroy your brand.

Your business name on the internet will belong to them. Period.

Under any program of this kind, in any vertical, you would have:

• Hijacked your brand-name search results to a domain you do not own
• Hijacked your brand-plus-service search results in every city you serve
• Exposed your firm to a Google spam-policy suspension that could cause your site to not appear in Search results at all, with no automated path back
• Tied your fate to forty-nine other firms you have never met, any of whose vendors could be reported by a competitor and take the whole network down with yours
• Transferred twelve to eighteen months of your accumulated brand authority onto a domain the vendor would keep on contract end
• Left you with no transferable assets and a vendor's portfolio domain ranking for your brand on the day you tried to leave

The asset that is worth more than every dollar this vendor would ever pay you in lead routing is the one you already own: your primary domain, ranking for your own name, generating leads on traffic you control outright. Keep all of your SEO on that domain. Refuse every variation of off-site SEO with your name attached. There is no exception, and there is no contract structure that makes the exception safe.

If you have already signed one of these contracts and want a second opinion on the damage, or if you have a proposal in front of you and want to evaluate it before signing, my contact information is in the footer of this site.

Related service: SEO for law firms — the full eight-workstream architecture, on the domain you own.

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