Dentist office website has foreign country backlinks. Scrap it or Move On
-
Another SEO person who was working my potential dental customer website managed to hookup over 147 backlinks to various bogus weather sites, watch sites, chinese sites etc.
The dentist owns the URL which is "dentist" plus his zipcode. Is it worth continuing SEO on this site or should I scrap the URL? I am worried that Google may take action on this site sometime in the future and all the work I will do will be lost.
He does have another website, because SEO's keeps trying to sell dentists microsites... This site isn't too bad but he doesn't own the URL but the url is a combination of the two doctors names and isn't easy to remember... and we would have to spend time trying to gain control of the URL.
Suggestions?
-
I agree with Joseph and Robert, in saying that the title of your company sounds a bit spammy to begin with. Maybe it's best if you use something along the lines of "ChicagoDentist.com" or even "ChicagoCosmeticDentistry.com" these allow you to use a keyword and sound more relavent to your audience.
I would also suggest starting fresh and making an update to work on "local signals" such as Merchant Circle, Google Local, LocalEze. These signals will help the page crawl up in local search and also allow other customers to review the company, which we all know in this day and age is a good thing.
As others have mentioned you do have the option of using a disavoy tool, but only Bing has such a tool right now and Bing only accounts for 38% of the search market, so you're going to be missing out on the other 70% and there's no way telling when Google will come out with such a tool.
-
This sounds like a good hybrid approach. Dentist+zip does sound spammy to me and using the doctors name in the URL doesn't give us any keywords we can use. I'll try to come up witha decent URL that looks both professional and keyword rich.
-
I agree with Alan and furthermore, I believe being an ethical SEO, your Job is to build quality links from relevant resources… in that case your job should be to build as many quality links as possible to make the link profile look natural… the more natural your link profile would be the more credibility it will have in the eye of Google and other search engines…
I believe you should continue with the current domain and start building quality links on it.
-
Hello Bob,
I agree with Alan re the hold off on scrapping the site. And, if there is a way to utilize what weight it does have, use KW research and see what type of quality domain that is exact match you can come up with. An example would be LodiCosmeticDentist.net, etc. (Then use 301 redirects from Dentist90210.com as you know to do.)
Handling dental sites, I never use smiles, smile, teeth, etc. as they are not terms that are searched for and I prefer a domain have some semblance of a keyword in it, if not an exact match.
-
Not knowing to much about the client I would probably just scrap it and start over for a few reasons.
1. If I'm understanding correctly the website is like dentist32432.com which feels a little spammy for me if I saw it in the SERP. I think that something with his name or another more unique identifier may be more helpful. In my SERP page I get a few results for urls like www.'townnamesmiles'.com and stuff like that. Try to get a domain that is creative and brand building.
2. The links probably aren't quality and not giving much advantage plus, who knows when google will roll out the link disavower and how it will work. It may just hurt more in the long run. If he has any links from local organizations it probably won't be to hard to get them change them.
3. I think a lot of people will just type 'dentist' in which case you get the big block of local results. I would try to optimize for that by trying to get some reviews, having a little social media thing going, etc...
This is all assuming the the current domain isn't ranking well and not driving business. However if it is and it's a competitive market I would take my chances with it.
Hope that helps.
-
Bing allowes you to diavow links, and Goolge is planning to do the same soon, so i would wait till then then disavow the links you dont trust.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
My Brand new website shows 79% spam Score, what is the reason and how should I deal with this?
Hi, I have just launched my website 1 month before and I have used all paid images, Uniquely written contents, Everything is genuine for better SEO experience in the future. The actual problem is its showing spam by 79% in MOZ bar, I don't have a single link on my website also my content is unique, Images are unique. Why its showing so much spam on this brand new website? Can you please help me? I am very stressed due to this problem.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | rahat640 -
Moving Pages Up a Folder to come off root domain
Good Morning I've been doing some competitor research to see why they're ranking higher than us and noticed that one who seems to be doing well has changed their url structure so that rather than being www.domain.com/product-category/product-subcategory/product-info-page/ they've removed levels so for instance they now have: www.domain.com/product-subcategory/ and www.domain.com/product-info-page/ basically everything seems to come off the root domain rather than having the traditional structure. Our rankings for the product-subcategory pages, which are probably what most people would search for, are just sitting below the first page in most instances and have been for a while I'm interested to know other people's thoughts and if this is an approach they've taken and had good results?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Ham19790 -
Backlink Indexing - will this technique hurt or help?
So I came across this idea on YouTube: Indexing your backlinks. I understand its not enough to just have google crawl your pages - you want them indexed. So, if you create backlinks on say a blog or social profile, will it benefit you to have them submitted to other popular blogs, news / pr sites, video channels - of which may be unrelated - for the sole purpose of getting them not just crawled but indexed? There are SEO companies that I have seen that claim they do exactly that (publish your backlinks all over the web - making backlinks for backlinks) but in reality is this a good thing or a bad thing? Could this help rankings or hurt them?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | momentum_technology_services0 -
Lost backlinks following switch from http to https
I have a client who appears to have taken a big hit in a few areas recently: MOZ Domain Authority has dropped from 16 to 1 In ahrefs, their http version has 103 backlinks from 46 referring domains, but the https version shows 'no data' for backlinks or referring domains Their 'average position' in SERPs has fallen from around 32 to 43 in the last six weeks Ininitally, I thought this might be due to the MOZ indexing problems last month. However, I now suspect this is connected to their switch from http to https, which occured in mid December. Although all the http pages appear to be redirecting, it looks like the backlinks are not being associated to their https version. Anyone had experience of this and/or now how to remedy?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | muzzmoz0 -
Assessing the true value of a backlink
I want to start a discussion about assessing the true value of a backlink. Here's a scenario: I've just started working on SEO for a new client. Once I've got the strategy stuff out of the way, I like to start by looking at backlinks that competitors have. I use Moz OSE (and other tools) and filter by followed links to the root domain. This gives a good starting sense of where competitors are getting links from. As I start to explore those links, I see some black-hat (or grey-hat) practices at play: display:none links, footer links, sidebar links, comment spam, etc. The problem I have is, there seems to be no way of knowing whether or not those links are responsible for boosting the competitors rankings. They come from sites that have good DA and PA, yet we're told that tactics like display:none and comment spam will either get those links devalued or may cause some sort of manual action. My question is, how do others evaluate the full spectrum of the value a link has that goes beyond trust, authority, and citation flow?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | SEMbyotic2 -
Backlink an article thats already on the web
Hey Mozers, Just wondering I noticed a few sites show "this article first appeared on domain.com" if there has been an article published on another site and is now publsihed on ours, how do we create a backlink to say it had first appeared on "domain.com" Any advice would be much appreciated Thanks
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | edward-may1 -
New un-natural links to my website that i didnt create.. and lots of them!
Hi There In the last few months my search organic traffic has gone down and i am looking into links to my website through webmaster tools. It looks like there is some sort of automated robot that is building new links to my website at a rate of 5 per week! All are spammy, directory links. It looks like this has been going on for a few months now. I have no idea how to find and stop this. But i have a feeling this might explain why my traffic is down. ALSO non of these links are in MOZ Open site explorer or Majestic SEO.. they are just showing as just discovered in webmaster tools. I am assuming that means its pretty accurate ?! ALL help is appreciated! Thanks! Paula
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Pixelstorm0 -
Does Backlinks from User Profile Page Still Matter
Though, lot of algorithmic changes, updates have happened. However, backlinks from quality source or trusted sites has hardly lost its importance and thats why Open SIte Explorer or Majestic seo is still there to find quality of backlinks, trust factor and authority factor of the backlinks. I need to know does having backlink (dofollow) from Profile Page - still matters and if yes - will a do follow backlink from Moz Profile Page or any authority site or forum page, having dofollow link from user profile page - does it still count as a mark to authority of your site.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Modi0