We often get people talking to us who are (wrongly!) worried that using our www.legalrss.uk or www.words4busines.com service will somehow damage their search rankings.
Leaving aside whole debate about search (which we don't use), here's an email we sent recently to a firm dealing with this subject.
' As a matter of interest, on the SEO point, just for fun I did a search on ‘commercial solicitor Birmingham’.
On page 1, 9 firms came up via organic search, 3 of which are our clients. We have about 6 client firms in that area (and 2 are niche firms not covered by that search term). According to the Law Society, there are 953 firms of solicitors listed in Birmingham.
Accordingly, we have 0.6% market share yet produce 30% of page 1 results on Google.
Maybe we should be claiming that using our service has a highly positive effect on Google rankings as a naïve interpretation of the data would certainly indicate that that is so! We make no such claim, by the way, but what is manifestly clear is that the argument that using what we do will somehow suppress rankings is extremely improbable indeed.'
PS Not too surprising, since legalrss.uk uses Javascripts, which Google will ignore and Words4Business.com content is present, on average on fewer than 0.000000003% of web pages. If Google was penalising that, it would have to penalise most English language websites in the world, because even though English is a big language, there are only so many ways of arranging words to say things – and most people use fewer than 5,000 words anyway).