It seems no-one is safe from Google Penguin and that includes small businesses such as Dentists. For a dentist SEO may have been done in the past by someone claiming to be an SEO expert, most dentists don’t have the time or the money to do their own SEO so when visitors to your site start falling drastically what are you meant to do?
Well if you haven’t heard of Penguin it is an update by Google to how they rank websites and huge numbers have been penalized or at the very least important links that used to give sites the ranks they did are now ignored.
The biggest problems though are where Google decide they don’t like the links you do have to the point where they penalize you and may potentially de-list some or all of your pages; this means some websites have seen numbers drop to zero.
As a dentist SEO may seem like something to stay away from in future then and turn your back on, the important thing with SEO though is to do it how Google want you to do it and avoid the tricks some unscrupulous SEO consultants use to get you quick but short-lived results.
A good SEO consultant who knows how SEO should be done can also reverse the effects of penguin and we have now got our first glimpse of Google’s attitude to those who do make the effort to remove those links they have a problem with and spam pages.
Google’s Penguin 1.1 isn’t a change to the algorithm but an update to the database, this means that they have checked again to see whether penalized sites have sorted their problems out, this means those that acted fast should now see traffic improve again.
There will presumably be future Penguin updates but it is likely that with time they will become less frequent so for a dentist SEO should be looked at as soon as possible to deal with problems. This isn’t always a quick job either, getting links removed can be a lengthy job and if it proves impossible you may have to send a plea to Google explaining that you can’t get a link removed, they will then take a view, once they get round to looking at it.
Also for a dentist SEO is likely to include some landing pages and these must include good quality content and not be stuffed with keywords to work, a good SEO consultant can fix this for you.
At the same time you may need new high quality links to replace those you have lost and ensure you get back to a good position in Google. This again takes time as good quality links are generally accompanied by unique high quality content such as comments and also need to be relevant. At least having seen the traffic you used to get from high rankings in Google though you know just how valuable to a dentist SEO can be.