5 reasons why you need to manage your website back links

Don’t get penalised for a poor back-link profile.

Good quality back links are still considered to be the most powerful off-site ranking factor for your website and, according to official represetatives from Google, will continue to play a major role as a ranking signal for some time to come.

For those reading this who may be new to web marketing, a back-link is exactly as it sounds i.e. a link from another website to your own. If the link is of sufficiently good quality, Google (and other search engines such as Bing), will see it as a vote of confidence for your own website and give you a boost in the search rankings accordingly.

However, the quality of a link in Google’s eyes can vary enormously; so for example a link from a website which is popular and authoritative in your own subject area, will be much more valuable than a simple link from a local business directory. The real concern is that some links are actually detrimental for your website and if you have too many pointing to you, then you can be penalised very heavily and pushed way back in the Google search index. A very bad situation and one that is difficult to recover.

So given the degree of importance which Google places on links, it makes sense to keep an eye on them ourselves so that we can manage any which may cause us a problem. With this in mind, here are five reasons why you need to keep a close eye on your dental website back-link profile.

Links are an extremely important ranking factor

As we’ve just discussed, good quality back links to your dentist website are a key factor for Google ranking purposes. If you don’t have any, don’t expect to rank well; particularly if you are in a competitive business with lots of other well-established websites around you. Even where you have a great website which is optimised correctly, you may still struggle if you don’t have good links.

Bad back-links can get your site relegated or even banned

If your previous search engine optimisation (SEO) company placed low quality links to your website, there comes a stage when the tipping point for a website penalty will be reached. Where bad outweighs good, Google will be on your case and you can expect your website rankings to suffer quite considerably. This can actually creep up unexpectedly, perhaps due to Google changing the algorithm they use to determine how a website should rank. It’s worth remembering that lots of poor back-links used to work well for website ranking until Google introduced their “Penguin” algorithm update in 2012 – after this, lots of dentists websites got pushed way back in the search results. Google evolves continually so expect more of these changes in future – what works well now may actually be a problem down the track.

Believe it or not, there is a pretty evil activity known as negative SEO. This is where a competitor pays to have bad links deliberately created to your website with the intention of having Google penalise you. I have seen this type of activity twice in the dental business. Whilst it’s unlikley to happen to you, monitoring your link profile will identify this very quickly.

How does you link profile compare to your competitors?

Has a new player appeared on the scene and displaced you in search results? Why might this be happening? Chances are that the new guy who appeared on page one of Google and eventually passed you by, is building links to his/her own website. You can get a good idea of what they are doing and also if there are any link opportunities you can take too. So it pays to monitor you own link profile and keep an eye on your close competitors too.

You can pick up bad links accidentally

You may think that your link acquisition process is under control but it’s also very important to realise that poor quality sites can link to you without your knowledge. Typical examples are when your content gets “scraped” for inclusion elsewhere or where a dodgy web directory creates an automatic entry for your business. Another one to watch out for is where a bone-fide business directory grabs your link and then inadvertently proliferates it across multiple categories. This can create hundreds of links very quickly which looks suspicious to Google.

Reputation management

If someone has a grieveance with your business for some reason, they may look for opportunities to discredit you via the web. This could involve posting negative reviews about you on-line, maybe with a link back to your website too. If you are monitoring yout links regularly, you can pick up this type of activity and try to take steps to manage it.

Summary

Monitoring and managing the backs links to your dental practice website is extremely important. This means that you have to allocate some time to identify and purge poor back-links as well as building good quality ones. With the correct tools you can do this yourself or perhaps better is to make sure that your digital marketing team have this as a standard activity within their SEO procedures.

If you would like to know more about how website links work or need a team experienced in dental SEO to take this up for you, please contact Dental Media on 01332 672548 for more advice.