The Gray Hat Lawyers Guide To Getting Listed In Lawyer Directorys

Getting your firm listed on the top lawyer directory sites can bring you visibility and leads – e.g. the FindLaw Lawyer directory gets over 11 million visitors per month and is the largest free legal information and lawyer/attorney directory online. If you’re a lawyer getting listed in this directory is beneficial in terms of the traffic it can send you and the SEO value associated with the listing – but the problem is getting listed is not cheap. If you go the white hat route of getting listed, you will be locked into a contract for at least a year.

What most lawyers (and attorneys) don’t realize is that there is more than one way to get listed in this prestigious directory, and this method can be applied just as easily to the Justia directory, Avvo Directory, or even the lawyers.com directory, as it can the FindLaw directory. It can be done for a fraction of the cost of going the white hat route.

Raise Your Hand If Your Familiar with expired domains?

expired domain name backlinks

Every day millions of domain names expire for various reasons – maybe the firm went out of business, changed its name, acquired a new partner, or perhaps someone just forgot to renew (which happens quite often). When these domains expire, they are available to be registered by anyone, and the links that they had acquired previously are now yours to benefit from.

With FindLaw being the largest lawyer directory online it is quite common for websites in already established listings to expire and become available – if you happen to purchase one of these domains that expired and 301 redirect it to your website you are now getting the benefits of the traffic and SEO value that comes with being listed in the FindLaw Directory for a fraction of the cost of going the white hat route – of course, there is no guarantee that the listing is going to stay online for any period of time but when the cost of most domain name registrations is less than ten to fifteen dollars even if the listing stayed up for a month your value far exceeds the cost associated.

The right way to 301 redirect your domain name?

When it comes to 301 redirects, there is the easy way to do it (bulk redirect all pages from expired domain to your main domains home page), and there is a right way to do it (set up individual redirects for each page on the old domain to specific pages on your main domain). There are a couple of different tools that can be used to help you do this:

  1. Ahrefs Free backlink checker
    1. Run the domain through the checker and then make a note of the pages that are listed in the top 100 backlinks for the domain and then set up 301 redirects for each of those pages to corresponding pages on your main site
  2. Wayback Machine
    1. Look up the site in the Wayback machine – find the sitemap or make a list of all the pages on the site (a majority of attorney websites have less than ten pages in total) and then set up 301 redirects for each of those pages to corresponding pages on your main site

Beware the black hat – AKA the hidden danger of letting your domain name expire

Expired domains also pose a potential security risk for firms, and I am not just talking about domains in the legal industry. For someone who wears a black hat then there is much more than backlinks that can be obtained by acquiring expired attorney and lawyer domain names – it is relatively simple to set up a catch-all email address, and by monitoring this account, you will see the newsletters from service providers that were previously sent to the recipients of the domain and then using the password reset functionality that most service-based websites provide – proceed to hijack the accounts that were set up.

It is strongly recommended that if you ever let a domain expire, make sure you cancel all of your email notifications and to use 2factor authentication whenever it is available. If you have staff – advise them to do the same.

Where can I find expired domain names that are listed in the lawyer directories?

Check out our lists of expired domain names with backlinks – we have lists of domains that expired and are listed in the FindLaw directory, the Justia directory, and many other high profile sites that are sure to give you an edge in your SEO and traffic generation initiatives.

What else do I need to know?
If Google (or other search engines) do not crawl the links of the page that are being 301 redirected to your site – the value of the expired domain backlinks won’t be present until they do. Of course, if you have patience the process of search engines recrawling a particular page will happen naturally but this can take time. To speed this up and to accelerate the applied value of the expired domain backlinks you will want to get those pages recrawled as quickly as possible – this can be done via any number of indexing services available online or by simply building some new links to your newly acquired backlink pages.