Worried google thinks we're a spam / content farm..
We're basically trying to create a searchable medical reference database for clinicians that leverages images/infographics as a medium for information exchange. Sort of like pinterest/Instagram but for doctors looking for reference info (algorithms, checklists, etc).
We built up a good amount of traction very quickly, all organic from google / google image search and were getting over 40k visitors/month until a recent algorithm change in May where we saw about 1/3 of our traffic disappear.
Images are uploaded by our medical community and all of our pages link back to the original source content for reference. Members like/bookmark high yield images as a measure of quality to upvote search results but I'm not sure google/bing's algorithms can see this value-add information and I think some of our individual page SEOs are dropping as a result.
Wondering if anyone has any thoughts on how we can try to work around this... our traffic was going way up and to the right every week until it dropped and flatlined in May.
edit: forgot to add link https://www.grepmed.com
Hi, some thoughts on this.
I’m sure you’re aware of the YMYL update (your money, your life) which in general focuses on sites that can significantly affect the well being of a searcher. Basically the intent, from Google’s perspective, is to validate the many many sites offering important information. One of the ways they do this is through evaluating authority (especially who is writing it).
Sites like WebMD and Mayo make sure to identify authors and credentials in the bylines (that’s why you’ll see a line like “medically reviewed by Joe Johnson MD”) so you might want to look into providing real names and credentials for your users.
Also, is your content duplicate content? If the images are just from other places on the web, eventually Google will sort through and only display images from the most authoritative site.
Thanks for your thoughts Gil,
We are trying to provide credentials of the clinician who uploaded/reviewed the image via the bio section under each image. But your post makes me wonder if providing some meta-data on who liked/bookmarked the image "this post was liked/bookmarked by Dr. ___, Dr. ___" might massage google in that direction.
Yes most of the content is duplicate as we try to clearly site the reference source so physicians can quickly vet the source. Results are so inconsistent however- very often we're #1 result (or unlisted) or the original site is above/below us and it's very inconsistent and on the surface does not seem to always relate specifically to the site's authority or popularity.
We're in a chicken-egg problem right now unfortunately where we don't have enough content for users to reliably come directly to us so we're reliant on google traffic until we're more standalone.