Google’s “Penguin” update has adversely affected the page rankings of hundreds of thousands of websites that relied heavily on the old link building school. The impact on some sites has been so severe that SEO managers are compelled to re-start from scratch. Online medical marketing firms that manage websites for doctors and dentists need to review their page rankings post-Penguin, and find urgent solutions to restore their rankings, if they have been hit by this update.

The first step must be to see if the medical website has engaged in any dubious link building schemes in order to boost the number of back links. Google’s Penguin algorithmic update is geared to track and identify such activity and penalize the websites that may have been involved in link building through such unfair schemes. Secondly, medical marketing experts should note that two-way links do not count for much with the search engines any longer.

Google is not against link building per se, and the number of links to a website is still one of the determining factors of the site’s page rankings. However, it is the quality of the links that counts much more than the quantity. The focus of dentist and doctor marketing and SEO must shift towards building high quality one-way back links to improve the site rankings.

This can be achieved by disseminating high quality and unique content by way of article writing, guest columns, blogging and social networking to well-ranking websites, forums and blogs. If Internet users find the content useful and compelling, it is bound to result in one-way back links to the medical website from highly respected websites and forums. Google looks at links only with a view to evaluate the quality of content of a particular website. Therefore, doctor SEO and marketing specialists should focus on the content more than ever before.