Let's Talk Medic/Health-Related Recovery

[GarrettGraff]

I run a health related site that was finally hit in the June 2019 Core Update. We had seen growth month over month for the past year or so before finally seeing a 60% drop in traffic, and slowly dwindling from there. Specifically, we have real (women) writers who write very nice articles on skincare topics and some other related stuff as well. We don't focus on super medical topics, but do have a section where we discuss skin conditions and that sort of stuff.

Does anybody have a sure-fire way to recover from this sort of filter?

My ideas:

1. Interview Doctors/Dermatologists, feature the interview on our site, link to their clinic/medical profile and have them also link to our site as well
2. Have doctors/dermatologists "review" our articles and link to their GMB in the sense of:
   1. This article has been reviewed by Dr. SarahMadeUpName who manages <a href="linktoclinic.com">SkinClinicAnywhere</a>

Anybody have any other ideas/strategies that you've seen work to get over this trust/authority filter?

 

[Ryuzaki]

I'm not in the health vertical any more but I've been following this saga closely because one of my sites got hit around the same time. Same thing, I got a drop and then it continued to dwindle with every update, especially buying guide style posts.

Concerning E-A-T specifically, I'm not convinced Google is fact checking articles algorithmically or keeping profiles of medical professionals (although they could be profiling people, they started that it seems when they put people's avatars in the SERPs with Google+).

Let's define that for the sake of newer readers:

• Expertise
• Authority
• Trust

I think E-A-T is entirely link-based, especially the A-T part. They could be doing sentiment analysis for the E-A part, using review sites, GMB reviews, and other "trust seal" type sites like Better Business Bureau, etc. Who knows, I think they claim they don't.

What I think happened with health sites, and maybe finance and others, is they created link-based thresholds, but also some kind of set of seed sites for these niches that can pass "health-trust." For their benefit, I'll link this: Examine.com . These guys got decimated but are apparently as trusted as sites like WebMD and Mayo Center, doing all the fact checking, linking to scientific resources, not pushing alternative medicine and stuff like that. Sounds to me like they simply didn't make it into the seed site list, perhaps just got missed when gathering sites. Who knows, that's pure speculation on my part but it's the only thing that makes sense when you look at what's been confirmed or denied.

In my own case, I started out wondering if all buying guide posts got wrapped up in the E-A-T game. I ultimately decided it was a Panda problem and treated it that way.

What tipped me off was the discovery of about ~700 extra blank pages indexed to my ~350 real posts. I fixed that, and it took a good 3 months to get most out of the index and 6 months to get it all out. In the mean time I pruned like ~150 posts (I can't remember exactly), added author boxes, tweaked the hell out of my theme on the backend, converted everything to Gutenberg since I needed to go through and nofollow my affiliate links (no, I didn't forget, it just turned out an HTTP header directive doesn't work on redirects), etc. I did all kinds of crap you could call technical SEO. Made sure every image had an alt text, fixed some screen reader issues... I turned over every stone. I treated it like a Panda issue, which meant everything technical needed to get looked at, especially indexation.

Here's how my organic traffic played out over that time:

The first bump between those two comments is when I set the "new version" of the site live from the staging server. Everything got a freshness bump, which seemed to last and not decay, which was interesting. Then there was an update recently on 8/27/19 that seemed to finally be a Panda refresh (I'm guessing, if my theory holds true) where I got another decent bump. If you ignore the freshness bump, that would have been a drastic increase in traffic overnight.

So either my Panda theory was correct or this is coincidental and they reverse most of the problems. The right of that graph is not all the way back where I was, but most of the damage is gone. I was fairly higher to the left of the graph, but the problems really started in late 2018.

That's what I have to add to the conversation. I'd look into any indexation issues and make sure the actual numbers match your expectations as the first move, since that needs to be done anyways. As far as actual E-A-T goes, nobody knows. Marie Haynes and others are riding their suggestions as a marketing and guru positioning tactic, but they don't know either. But their suggestions certainly aren't harmful for user trust and experience, and Google will likely take it to that level in the next 10 years, but right now their suggestions are expensive and time consuming for being a complete guess.

My policy has been to simply abandon health as a viable niche from here out. It's probably the same for finance, I don't know though. I never dug in from that angle. "Your Money, Your Life." Even BodyBuilding.com, the ancient giants, took a beating.

 

[darkzerothree]

@Ryuzaki

So what are you focusing on now? If health and finance are both dead, as you seem to assume?

 

[Olov]

I had two sites that tanked due to Medic update. Both were in a European language, not English. They still jump up and down in rankings.

It feels like I've been through every theory there is. But now, I think it all just comes down to links and non-spam filter.

I don't believe for a second about having writers with authority and writing a long "about us"-page. My small country has only 10 million people (plus 2 million illegals). No way in hell that Google would manually look through our sites or judge which writer/doctor is reliable in the field.

Rather, I would think they have a a couple if sites in each country that are more authoritative in the medical field than others. The longer/further away you are from these sites, link-wise, lesser chance you have of being safe in ranking for medical terms.

From all the sites that tanked by medical update, the only ones I saw getting back all of their traffic (or more) are the ones that had great link profiles.

I've seen sites having articles "reviewed by doctor" and all that, but no change.

 

[Erayz]

Even BodyBuilding.com, the ancient giants, took a beating.

My theory is that google will manually go through a niche and manually assign DA for the main generic keywords.
The A list generally ends up being a few online plays and the old media corps which should start coming up.
The rest may recover, but not likely to the previous traffic levels as they are relegated from the A grade to a lower division.

The rest compete for 2+ keywords.