How to Recover from Google’s Medic Update #4

In the final installation of the Google Medic Recovery series (Part 1, Part 2 & Part 3), we are going to talk about technical SEO factors that played into the update. There’s been a lot of talk about what you should focus on but I tend to always turn to the people who I respect the most in the space. One of which is Barry Schwartz from SEOroundtable.com

Keyword Optimization

A few days after the update happened, he did an analysis using an SEO tool called Cora to dive deep into the actual technical SEO factors that may have impacted or improved one’s website rankings.

The report is here. To summarize this piece, the sites that improved the best had more keywords related to the focus topic in the content & html while the negatively impacted sites didn’t have as many keywords in the content & html. We aren’t talking about keyword stuffing here. We are talking about well researched semantic keywords that let Google know what the content or section of the site is about.

Backlink Profiles

The same report also noted that sites with bad backlink profiles also suffered losses compared to sites with diverse, trustworthy backlink profiles. This should come to no surprise as the “trust” of a site’s domain is something you ultimately have to always be improving….especially if you’re in a competitive medical niche.

I’ve also heard other SEO’s talking about their client’s sites and how many of them that had a large number of links from the same source also saw declines. Nothing against the awesome RealSelf.com but a handful of the site’s I’m working on that were impacted have hundreds of do-follow links from their URL. If you’re in the medical niche and a large majority of your back-link profile is from a directory / informational site like Real Self, you’ll want to start to diversify immediately and get a larger amount of single, highly-trusted domains as a part of your link profile.

Have a concern that your site was hit by the Medic Algorithm update around August 1st 2018? Contact us today.