I’m currently testing a hypothesis that if a website has medical articles and top 10 results feature sites like healthline.com you should get out of that top 10. Just delete the pages and that’s it. Especially since after the Google Core Update in January, these exact articles dropped the hardest for me, falling outside the top 20.
It really feels like Google is telling me point-blank: dude, get out of here. See, healthline.com has arrived, so you’re heading for the door.
Build a large company, hire doctors and experts, invest millions of dollars in your project, and then I’ll think about it and most likely take you on board.
In the meantime, rot outside the top results where there is no life, just like beyond the Moscow Ring Road.
What I did:
- Analyzed each page to see how much of a medical angle it has.
- Checked the top 10 for several keywords using Ahrefs, and if medical sites were consistently in the top 5 for those keywords, then…
- Deleted the articles…
I think trying to get in there with an affiliate site is a non-starter.
Yes, I see that sites with zero authority manage to squeeze into the top using medical links—I wrote about this here: https://t.me/maxaffiliate/268 meaning links + I think prior assessor ratings indicating that the site is explicitly medical, so Google pushes it straight to the top. But then a Google Core Update hits, and this happens: https://t.me/maximaffiliate/273
We discussed this in the Centurica group (https://t.me/maximaffiliate/235) and concluded that sites make very decent money during the few months they stay in the top, so it’s definitely economically viable. However, my niche is different, and you have to chase expired domains that easily sell for $10k with only 100–200 referring domains total. But the key isn’t the domains—it’s the E-A-T trust the site possesses that allows medical articles to rank immediately. Because some don’t rank at all. People set them up and there’s no effect whatsoever.
Long story short.
I deleted the medical articles or those where medical sites are already ranking. Waiting.
Oh damn, I forgot to mention. When I deleted the pages, I didn’t set up a 404 error; instead, I set up a redirect from those pages to the homepage. And 4 days later, that page plunged downward, even though it had remained unchanged for a long time before that.
Here is a screenshot:
I suspect these pages are toxic to the site, and by setting up a 301 redirect, I’m dragging down another page, so in this case, it would be better to return a 404 error.
That’s how things stand.