1 domain dominating unbranded search terms?

[irvingw]

Anyone have any insight or comments?

We’ve been negatively impacted by the last Google algorithm update - not by a penalization of our site but because another site is now grabbing the top 3-4 search results for long tail physician name searches thereby pushing us lower in the rankings.  Being that we’ve never seen this happen with unbranded search terms, we’re not sure how to address it.

To see an example, click http://www.google.com/search?q=dr.+elizabeth+eads.  You’ll notice that the top 4 results are all from 1 site - HealthGrades - with 2-3 of the 4 pages being canned, pre-written templates without any unique content (see malpractice & sanction pages).  It seems that they are doing this by paginating their information into separate pages, thus appearing in multiple search results, instead of putting all the information on 1 page, as we do and Google’s best practices suggest.

Any advice or comments would really be appreciated.

[scanlin]

Sorry; I assumed the first non-Healthgrades result was yours. Apologies. I agree with Nick P above that for a phrase like the doctor's name where there is little competition you should be able to out-rank them pretty easy. Use best of breed on-page SEO and then get a few links to your page with the doc's name as anchor text. It probably won't take more than a handful because the phrase (doc name) is  so non-competitive.

I don't know that healthgrades is getting a free pass on anything but their sub-sub-sub pages probably are having just enough PR flow to them that they outrank a smaller site with a page on the same topic. But, again, you should be able to win this battle pretty easily with a tiny bit of focused attention. Now, if you have 50,000 doc names that you want to compete for then you may need a different strategy of external link building. You could always try it with 1 doc and see what it takes to outrank healthgrades. I'd actually be curious if 1 credible external link (on an indexed page with doc name as anchor text) does it, or if you need 5, or 50. Maybe you could run a one-doctor test and post results...?

[NickPateman81]

If you are really keen to rank for Dr X then you'll be able to. Google isn't perfect, it does rank crappy sites for keywords that are almost irrelevant. However this is often the case when competition is low and no one has signalled Google to tell them what their content is about.

Feel free to PM me with your site details James, I might be able to help you out.

[irvingw]

Thanks, but that is not my site you're looking at. Either way, are you saying it is acceptable by Google to have in its second and third results, pages with no data except "Dr X has no sanctions". There is a whole slew of competing web sites who have valuable and distinctive data. Is Heatlhgrades getting a free pass in Google because of their high PR and that they are keyword stuffing?

[scanlin]

It looks like the page that is beating you has better on-page SEO for that phrase. They use the phrase in header tags, while you use it in SPAN and B tags. They have the term in a few IMG alt tags, you do not.

Have you run their page and your page through the On-page analyzer here at SEOMoz? That might give you a few suggestions to improve your on-page SEO.

Also, their root domain is PR7 while yours is PR6 (I know, toolbar PR is out of date and not a good indicator, but it may mean you need more external links to your subpages, for example), and might explain why they are higher than you if all other things are equal.

[NickPateman81]

I'm a little confused. "dr. elizabeth eads" has no search traffic and is almost certainly beatable from an exact match title element and two or three anchored links.

When a search term's competition is so low, it makes it a lot easier for one website that Google deems as the most relevant to result in multiple listings. Are there any other examples you have?