Some Changes Coming To Letters Blogatory


Readers, heads up! You can expect to see some changes at Letters Blogatory in the near future. Since the blog really exists for you, I thought I’d give you a short explanation.

There is a lawyer in New Jersey, who I’m sure is excellent, and whose firm is called Folkman Law. As you can imagine, all things being equal, I’d prefer that when you Google my name, you get me rather than him in your search results. (No offense, Mr. Folkman!) Anyway, I did a lot of research and hired a very good firm that helps companies with search engine optimization. There are all kinds of disreputable people out there in the SEO field, who engage in all kinds of shady practices. Needless to say, I did’t hire a firm like that: I went with a firm that didn’t promise fast results and that was entirely above-board. I’m not going to name the firm because they were great at what they do and I don’t want to create a misimpression. But at the end of the day, what they wanted to do was to modify my new firm’s website to make the headings and text more “Google friendly.” So for example, instead of “Folkman LLC. Boston. Global.” as the title on the home page, they wanted something like, “Ted Folkman is your international law and business litigation lawyer in Boston, MA. Call today!” Again, no criticism intended—I’m sure that their ideas would help my site to rank better in Google. But I came to realize that given the nature of my business, “ranking in Google” is not an important goal, and that maintaining my “brand” and the character of my text was much more important than ranking higher than a gentleman from New Jersey. So after spending some time and money, we parted ways, no hard feelings.

The SEO firm did, though, make one suggestion that I think is very good. They pointed out that my new business site, folkman.law, has essentially no “domain authority.” Domain authority is a measure of how authoritative and awesome a domain is. But Letters Blogatory, they pointed out, has a ton of domain authority. When I was working at other firms, I always thought it was really important to keep my own online identity separate from my firm’s. But now that I am working for myself, it makes sense to align my “work” identity more closely with my “blog” identity and to let my business benefit from the hard work I have put in to this blog over many years. However, it’s important to me to keep the Letters Blogatory name and to make sure that all existing links continue to work.

So with all this in mind, here is the agenda that I’m working to accomplish.

  1. Letters Blogatory will share the look and feel of the Folkman LLC website. This one is, I think, not a huge deal, since aside from the color orange, there has never been much distinctive about the look of Letters Blogatory.
  2. The new online home for Letters Blogatory will be at https://lettersblogatory.com/lettersblogatory. This is probably the biggest change, and the one that gives me the most heartburn. The good news is that I will set things up so that if you type lettersblogatory.com into your browser, it will take you to the right place.
  3. I am going to retire the Letters Blogatory email server. This decision is partly driven by my own wish not to have to administer an email server anymore. Learning how to do it was great—it was great for its own sake and it also taught me stuff about how a server works that has helped me as a litigator, especially in the area of e-discovery. After a date that I will announce, my lettersblogatory.com email address will no longer work, and all emails will go through a folkman.law email account.

I don’t have a deadline to accomplish these tasks, but I wanted to let you know that they are coming, so that you’re not surprised.

Thank you as always for your support of Letters Blogatory!


3 responses to “Some Changes Coming To Letters Blogatory”

  1. We wish your Update Program well, those that use and appreciate your Blogatory will undoubtedly update accordingly so as not to miss any news and updates.

    1. Thanks Ian! If all goes well you won’t have to update—typing in lettersblogatory.com will still get you there!

  2. Antonio Fiorentino Di Stefano

    Sounds like they proposed putting up your shingle in the Red Zone. Good luck with the change.

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