1,122 Law Firm Blog Posts, and 76% Never Name a Lawyer
Personal injury law is about as high-stakes as web content gets. Somebody reads a page about their accident claim and makes a decision that affects the rest of their life. So I went and checked who these pages say wrote them. Across 38 firms and 1,122 posts, most of them name nobody. A few credit their web design agency.
What was measured? 38 Canadian personal injury law firms. 1,122 blog posts, sampled evenly across the 20,793 URLs listed in their own sitemaps. For each post I looked at what the site tells a machine about who wrote it. 29 of the 38 firms, or 76%, do not name a lawyer on most of their posts. 15 firms byline the firm itself. Six credit a CMS default or their web design agency, with real values including admin, SEO, copywriting, Slyfox Web Design and Team IT Lime. Nine firms do it properly. No firm is named in this piece, and I explain why below.
Why I looked
Google spent its last two core updates trying to work out who wrote a page and whether that person would plausibly know the subject. That is the whole substance of the experience and expertise part of E-E-A-T, and the scrutiny is heaviest in categories where bad information does real damage. Injury law sits near the top of that list.
So the question is simple and checkable. When a search engine reads one of these pages, what does it learn about the author?
What I measured
For each firm I pulled the post sitemap, sampled up to 30 posts spread evenly across it rather than just the newest ones, and read four things: the author field in JSON-LD, the meta name="author" tag, any rel="author" link, and visible bylines in the page text matching patterns like “Written by”, “Posted by” and “Written on behalf of”.
Then I classified every distinct byline value by hand. Not with a pattern match. I will come back to why that mattered.
The numbers
By firm, based on what the majority of that firm’s posts say:
| What the byline says | Firms | Share |
|---|---|---|
| The firm’s own name | 15 | 39% |
| A named lawyer | 9 | 24% |
| Nothing at all | 5 | 13% |
| A bare first name, no surname | 3 | 8% |
| A CMS default | 3 | 8% |
| Their web design agency | 3 | 8% |
And across all 1,122 individual posts:
| What the byline says | Posts | Share |
|---|---|---|
| The firm’s own name | 370 | 33% |
| A named lawyer | 292 | 26% |
| Nothing at all | 189 | 17% |
| A CMS default | 111 | 10% |
| A bare first name | 83 | 7% |
| Their web design agency | 76 | 7% |
So roughly one post in four names a human being who could conceivably be held to what it says.
What the bylines actually say
These are real values, copied out of live pages:
adminandAdmin, the WordPress default, on hundreds of postsSEO, on posts published in August 2026 by a firm that publishes genuinely good local content every fortnightcopywritingContent Import, which is what a migration script leaves behindsginjury.adminshoutmedia,open-concept,Team IT LimeandSlyfox Web Design, which are web agencies
The agency ones are the most revealing. A firm hired someone to build a site, that someone was logged in when the content went up, and nobody ever changed the field. Years later Google still reads a page about catastrophic brain injury and is told the author is a web design company.
The firms doing it right are doing it very right
Nine firms name a real lawyer, and several of them go further. One publishes first-person client stories with a named partner attached to every one. That is not a schema tweak. It is the actual thing Google has been asking for since 2023, which is content that could only have been written by someone who was there.
Worth saying plainly: this is not a hard problem. It is a template field and a decision about whose name goes on what. The firms that fixed it did not have to write anything new.
What I got wrong first, and why it matters
My first pass sampled posts by following links from each firm’s blog index page. It returned 80%. That number was wrong, and I nearly published it.
On several sites the links off the blog index are navigation and practice-area pages, which correctly carry no author markup. Sampling those and concluding “this firm has no bylines” is a measurement error, not a finding. When I crawled the post sitemaps instead, several firms I had marked as having no attribution turned out to attribute every single post to a named partner.
If you are auditing anything for the absence of a thing, sample the sitemap. A claim that a site never does something needs a census, not a convenience sample. Presence claims are safe from a sample. Absence claims are not.
What I cannot tell you
Whether any of this cost these firms traffic. I can see what their markup says. I cannot see their Search Console. Anyone claiming a causal link between a byline field and a ranking drop, on this evidence, is guessing.
Six firms are excluded from every number above because they blocked the request or timed out. The sample is 30 posts per firm at most, spread across the sitemap, not every post. And a byline written in some format my four checks did not catch would read as absent when it is not. That is exactly the error I made the first time, so I assume it is still in here somewhere at a smaller scale.
Why no firm is named
Because the finding is about a category, not about anyone in particular, and a study that names firms in order to say something unflattering about them is a different kind of document with a different purpose. The pattern is what is interesting. Any individual firm on this list can fix their own in an afternoon, and several of the ones I contacted privately already knew.
Check it yourself
No paid tool needed. Pick any law firm site and run this:
curl -s https://example.com/post-sitemap.xml | grep -o "<loc>[^<]*" | sed "s/<loc>//"
curl -s https://example.com/some-blog-post/ | grep -o '"author":{[^}]*}'
curl -s https://example.com/some-blog-post/ | grep -o 'name="author" content="[^"]*"'If the second and third commands return nothing, or return the word admin, you have reproduced the finding on a sample of one.
Counts were taken on 6 September 2026. These sites publish continuously, so the numbers will drift. If you run this and get something different, I would genuinely like to know.
If your own traffic dropped and you are working out what caused it, the helpful content update diagnostic is the sequence I use, and the free audit tool runs 25 checks on any URL without a signup. If you would rather talk it through, book twenty minutes and send your URL when you book.
SEO & Growth Specialist with 8+ years of experience and 100+ campaigns delivered across India, the US, UK, Canada and Australia. Founder of SEORevive, based in Guwahati. Specialises in Google penalty and algorithm recovery, technical SEO and organic growth.