Link building activities have traditionally been at the heart of any SEO and Internet marketing campaign for medical and dental professionals. A benchmark study by Marketing Sherpa revealed that 60 percent of SEO and Internet marketers have been involved with some form of external link building activities. External in-bound links to the website have always meant to improve the authority, popularity and credibility of a website.
However, of late, Google and other search engines have been devaluing any such external links that may not have been generated organically or naturally. Press release based links are their latest target.
Search Engine Optimized Press Releases
Press releases were always considered to be a legitimate tool to build links and improve the SEO for a website. Medical and dental practitioners typically create genuine online press releases to inform their target audience about any new services, procedures, special offers or other announcements. Links to the doctor or dentist website are naturally included in the press release to optimize content.
When such a press release is distributed through PR syndication services, it would be posted on hundreds of websites, usually with all the links intact. That would effectively mean excellent back link value for the practice. Internet marketers began over-exploiting this opportunity to build back links and boost their website search rankings.
End of PR Back Links
Google has seen fit to decide that SEO value achieved through press release based links is just another source of artificial or paid links. Google has formally announced to all webmasters to “nofollow” all links in press releases just the way they already do it for links in paid advertisements.
It may not be practically possible for a dentist or doctor to physically “nofollow” links for all the past press releases distributed through multiple sources. However, if there are old press releases posted on their own practice website, it is advisable to “nofollow” the links in such PRs. For all the future press releases, the goal should be information dissemination and not link building. Therefore, “nofollow” should be performed for all links in future press releases to avoid getting penalized for it by the search engines.