The past month has been hectic in the world of Dental SEO, with the JC Penney case and the latest algorithmic changes in the form of the content farm update from Google has again created scenes of panic in the industry.
Firstly I believe the update was made as a direct response to the JC Penney expose, although it was in the pipeline I can see why Google will have brought it forward to dampen the many awkward questions being fired their way querying the strength of their spam detectors. And if JC Penney has been building this number of links for a sustained period of time and seeing results, how many of your competitors have been doing the same, only you don’t have the weight of the New York Times to make Google take notice.
I can see it from their Dental SEO Company’s perspective; build tonnes of links that sail close to the wind in terms of Google guidelines: Get your client site to the top of the SERPS for every term they’ve ever wanted. Businesses are made or broken by this form of risk taking so I for one pray the update has better detection for this, the whole ethical Google argument goes out of the window when you can throw money at link buying.
I haven’t seen any direct impact from the update, although long tail search results seem a touch cleaner, Matt Cutts has identified sites such as eHow as the target for low quality content. There are too many sites that regurgitate content, and this crackdown is long overdue, the web is the future of knowledge share and information retrieval for you and me, and anything that stands in its way should be obliterated.
From an Dental SEO perspective, link building is more of a tightrope than ever, but it is a necessary evil that is still the best way to get quick rankings, it will just be the ones that know how to stay far enough within the guidelines that get the best results without getting penalised.
