Google Introduces Major Ranking Updates – What Does It Mean For Dental Websites?

Is your practice website at risk?
Google recently announced a new round of ranking algorithm updates which are widely accepted to bring some significant changes to where websites rank in the search index. These types of updates are fairly frequent and have varying effects; some introduce quite large changes, others are quite niche and are targeted at certain types of websites. As a reminder, Google does this to improve how their search engine performs and to bring the best experience for users. Whether this always works as Google intended however, is debatable!
What’s so special about the latest changes and should you be worried?
The bottom line here is that unless you or your SEO team has been doing something outside of Google’s quality guidelines, then you shouldn’t really have too many concerns that you website will suffer too much in the search results. Many of Google’s updates are targeted at those websites which have used egregious methods to artificially promote websites e.g. artificial link-building, hidden pages etc.
It’s fair to say that in the competitive world of dentistry, lots of dentists’ websites have been penalised historically, primarily where the dentist trusted an SEO partner who subsequently operated outside of the Google quality guidelines and got caught. But if you or your SEO company has done the right things, then this shouldn’t apply to you.
However, some updates are not targeted at ‘dodgy’ SEO and instead look to promote websites which are technically excellent and provide good user experience. Where websites are old, perhaps with stale content and hence a poor user experience, then it is possible for such a site to fall away in the search results. So whilst it’s the websites which have been subject to egregious SEO which will receive the heavy penalties, old, poor-quality sites can also fall away over time too. Given that a great website with prominent Google positions is so important for new patient enquiries, this is an important thing to note when planning how to keep your website fresh and performing well.
The important thing to note about the latest changes, which started around March 5th and could take a month or so to complete, is that they incorporate a lot of what has been discussed above i.e. anti-spam (dodgy SEO) updates and additional updates that assess website quality and user-experience. Let’s take a quick look.
Updates targeting manipulative SEO
These are now fairly frequent and continually build on updates which Google first introduced over 12 years ago. This time around there are some specific new elements, for example targeting the use of personal blog networks (a collection of sites built simply to provide back links) – we are aware that a number of dental marketing companies do this for the client’s SEO, so you may see some repercussions there if your provider is playing fast and loose with the Google’s web publishing guidelines.
There is also new targeting based on taking down those sites which provide a publishing platform for third-party content designed simply to build links.
The bottom line here is that if your SEO partner is doing the right thing, then you shouldn’t really be worried; if they’re not then Google will catch up with you, if not this time around then certainly at some point in the future.
Helpful content update
Last year Google introduced the “helpful content” update which was initially a one-off hit designed to remove website pages from the search index which were ‘unhelpful’. By this they meant websites which were simply re-purposing other people’s content or writing about topics in an un-original way which had already been covered better elsewhere.
In the latest updates, Google made the ‘helpful content’ element part of the core algorithm set, meaning that website content will be evaluated for usefulness way more regularly than before. They advise that they expect to see over 40% of non-useful content eliminated from the search rankings.
You may wonder how your own dental practice website might fall foul of this and to be fair the vast majority won’t. However we have helped dentists who came to us with websites which had tanked in Google where their marketing partner had filled their blogs with really poor, short articles designed to improve Google ranking. For example, many very similar articles were added about Invisalign, implants etc which may have helped with search positions in the past, but very likely would fall foul of the ‘helpful content’ parameters now.
Our assessment was that these websites were indeed penalised for poor content which resulted in their rankings falling away rapidly. We were able to re-work a lot of the blog content for the new clients, deleting the rubbish and improving the rest. This resulted in the websites recovering all of their lost rankings over the following 3 – 4 months.
So if your marketing company is filling your blog with crappy, short, SEO focused articles, then you may get caught out.
Summary
Google continues to roll out significant changes to the automated methods it uses to rank websites in the search index, favouring some, demoting others and even penalising websites which try too hard to manipulate the results.
There are perhaps three key areas to be aware of to make sure you stay in Google’s good books and don’t fall foul of these regular changes:
- Don’t spam the search index with techniques such as artificial link-building
- Don’t try to elevate your search footprint by filling your website and/or blog with superficial content that could be categorised as ‘unhelpful’ and potentially be penalised as a result
- Do make sure you try to keep you website and content up-to-date. This means publishing content which users will genuinely find helpful as well as making sure that the technical under-pinnings of your site are as close to latest standards as possible. Basically, don’t let it all go stale.
Do the above and you’ll have nothing to worry about and a website which will continue to work hard bringing new patients to your dental practice. If you need more advice on SEO for dentists and the topics discussed above, please call the Dental Media team on 01332 672548 for help.