In recent times, Google appears to have come down heavily against the age-old SEO tactic of excessive link building. Hundreds of thousands of websites, including doctor and dentist websites have been adversely affected in terms of their page rankings for various keywords. Webmasters have been trying to clean the extensive mess of low quality links, which they believe may be causing lower page rankings for their sites.

Google has issued guidelines regarding how a website can get rid of unreliable links that may be doing it more harm than good. In fact, it has also introduced a tool that helps a webmaster ‘disavow’ links to the site. If your website is among the ones that have received a notification of a manual spam action on the basis of “unnatural” links to your site, Google’s ‘Disavow’ tool can help address the problem.

It is important to remember that links still continue to remain as one of the key signals that indicate to the search engines about the relevance and reputation of a website. Healthcare SEO experts cannot afford to undermine the importance of high quality links. However, it is the spammy, low quality links, link exchange schemes and paid links that violate the guidelines of search engines, and result in downgrading of the site’s rankings.

Google recommends that webmasters should remove from their website as many poor quality and dubious links as possible. This is the most effective and sure way to attack the problem of lower page ranks due to bad links. Getting rid of low quality links will help improve the reputation of your medical site among the readers. When people see spammy links pointing to a website, they tend to develop a negative impression about the website or the business. That is something you need to avoid. Wherever you find that you are unable to remove the bad links, Google’s ‘Disavow links’ tool can do the job for you.