Medical / Health Content Authority - Content Mix Question
-
Greetings, I have an interesting challenge for you. Well, I suppose "interesting" is an understatement, but here goes.
Our company is a women's health site. However, over the years our content mix has grown to nearly 50/50 between unique health / medical content and general lifestyle/DIY/well being content (non-health). Basically, there is a "great divide" between health and non-health content.
As you can imagine, this has put a serious damper on gaining ground with our medical / health organic traffic. It's my understanding that Google does not see us as an authority site with regard to medical / health content since we "have two faces" in the eyes of Google.
My recommendation is to create a new domain and separate the content entirely so that one domain is focused exclusively on health / medical while the other focuses on general lifestyle/DIY/well being. Because health / medical pages undergo an additional level of scrutiny per Google - YMYL pages - it seems to me the only way to make serious ground in this hyper-competitive vertical is to be laser targeted with our health/medical content. I see no other way.
Am I thinking clearly here, or have I totally gone insane? Thanks in advance for any reply.
Kind regards,
Eric
-
I like Robert's ideas about making a site structure that segregates the topics by folder and by internal linking.
My sites have very diverse topics and they rank well. I believe that it is more about the vigor of your publishing efforts, the quality of your content, and how well your visitors engage it.
-
Thanks Rob! I appreciate your feedback!
-
Hey Eric,
No, you're right. If that's the degree to which your content is diverging, it may be necessary to have 2 completely separate domains. One set does not have anything to do with the other, and that will absolutely affect relevance and compatibility when it comes to linking practices.
You could go with a subdomain structure and diverge your link profiles - it would have much the same effect as going with 2 separate domains. That being said, it makes life really difficult if you are moving domains or redirecting in the future, so a subdomain structure is pretty permanent and not ideal if most links are coming back to your Home Page.
You could attempt a social media bridge for both sites, but that may be a bit beyond what you are trying to accomplish here. I think you have the right of it based on the facts presented.
Here's wishing you the best of luck on the shift!
Best,
Rob
-
Thanks Rob,
I think the "content divide" is even more severe for us, since we don't have the patients vs providers issue. All content is consumer-facing.
We truly have two radically different buckets of content. For example, copd symptoms vs. how to get rid of ants, or living with atrial fibrillation vs. aries daily horoscope, or ways to lower your blood pressure vs. how to deal with a difficult coworker. These topics are incongrous to me, and I don't see a way to keep them on same domain. Feel free to disagree!
- Eric
-
Hi Eric,
Interesting question is right! I did some consulting for a pharma client recently who was having this exact same problem. They had a divergence of domain authority because they were attempting to appeal to 2 different markets (i.e. 2 different sets of keywords - one for patients and one for providers) using the same domain. Their original answer was to create a subdomain which could be ranked separately so they could appeal to their patients and their providers simultaneously, but that split their link juice too much and they lost out both ways. This is when they contacted me.
My suggestion was to create a site architecture that reflected the needs of the 2 groups that were approaching the site. In other words, creating 2 funnels, 1 each for patients and for providers. Since we instituted that change 3 months back, we hit 1st page and continue to improve. That would be my suggestion here:
Build out 2 niche lines using site structure for health vs. non-health to create relevance in the eyes of Google - that should be enough to take care of the issue you're outlining here. Let me know if there's anything I'm missing here.
Cheers,
Rob
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Content Audit Questions
Hi Mozzers Having worked on my companies site for a couple of months now correcting many issues, im now ready to begin looking at a content review, many areas of the site contain duplicate content, the main causes being 1. Category Page Duplications
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ATP
e.g.
Widget Page Contains ("Blue Widget Extract")
Widget Page Contains ("Red Widget Extract")
Blue Widget Page Contains ("Same Blue Widget Extract")
Red Widget Page Contains ("Same Red Widget Extract") 2. Product Descriptions
Item 1 (Identical to item 2 with the exception of a few words and technical specs)
Item 2 Causing almost all the content on the site to get devalued. Whilst i've cleared all moz errors and warnings im certain this is causing devaluation of most of the website. I was hoping you could answer these questions so I know what to expect once i have made the changes. Will the pages that had duplicate content recover once they possess unique content or should i expect a hard and slow climb back? The website has never receive any warnings from Google, does this mean recovery for penalties like duplicate content will be quicker Several pages rank on page 1 for fairly competitive keywords despite having duplicate content and keyword spammy content. What are the chances of shooting myself in the foot by editing this content? I know I will have to wait for google to crawl the pages before i see any reflection in the changes, but how long after google has crawled the page should I get a realistic idea of how positive the changes were? As always, thanks for you time!0 -
H3 Tags - Should I Link to my content Articles- ? And do I have to many H3 tags/ Links as it is ?
Hello All, On my ecommerce landing pages, I currently have links to my products as H3 Tags. I also have useful guides displayed on the page with links useful articles we have written (they currently go to my news section). I am wondering if I should put those article links as additional H3 tags as well for added seo benefit or do I have to many tags as it is ?. A link to my Landing Page I am talking about is - http://goo.gl/h838RW Screenshot of my h1-h6 tags - http://imgur.com/hLtX0n7 I enclose screenshot my guides and also of my H1-H6 tags. Any advice would be greatly appreciated. thanks Peter
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PeteC120 -
Duplicate content question
Hi there, I work for a Theater news site. We have an issue where our system creates a chunk of duplicate content in Google's eyes and we're not sure how best to solve. When an editor produces a video, it simultaneously 1) creates a page with it's own static URL (e.g. http://www.theatermania.com/video/mary-louise-parker-tommy-tune-laura-osnes-and-more_668.html); and 2) displays said video on a public index page (http://www.theatermania.com/videos/). Since the content is very similar, Google sees them as duplicate. What should we do about this? We were thinking that one solution would to be dynamically canonicalize the index page to the static page whenever a new video is posted, but would Google frown on this? Alternatively, should we simply nofollow the index page? Lastly, are there any solutions we may have missed entirely?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TheaterMania0 -
Technical Site Questions
When i do a google cache of our site, i see 2 menus, our developers say that's because the 2nd is for the mobile menu - is that correct, as when i look up other sites that have mobile rendering they only have one menu visible. Plus GWT's has the number of internal links per page at least x2 what they should have - are they connected? Secondly when i do a spider test through http://tools.seobook.com/general/spider-test/ it shows all "behind the scenes text" eg font names, portals, sliders, margins - "font size px" is shown as 17 times and a density of 2.15% - surely this isnt correct as google will be thinking that these are my keywords !? My site is www.over50choices.co.uk Thanks Ash
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AshShep10 -
Should I change .html to / ?
On my ecommerce site, we have .html extensions on all files and categories. I was wondering if it is worth the development cost to make all of them / ? Is there any SEO benefit in doing so? Thanks, B
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bjs20100 -
Domain authority imrpovement
Hi all, I'm trying to increase the domain authority of the www.gpmsummit.com. Is there any advice to improve it efficiently? Many thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | WTGEvents0 -
Duplicate Content Through Sorting
I have a website that sells images. When you search you're given a page like this: http://www.andertoons.com/search-cartoons/santa/ I also give users the option to resort results by date, views and rating like this: http://www.andertoons.com/search-cartoons/santa/byrating/ I've seen in SEOmoz that Google might see these as duplicate content, but it's a feature I think is useful. How should I address this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | andertoons0