Dentist office website has foreign country backlinks. Scrap it or Move On

[Czubmeister]

Another SEO person who was working my potential dental customer  website managed to hookup over 147 backlinks to various bogus weather sites, watch sites, chinese sites etc.

The dentist owns the URL which is "dentist" plus his zipcode.  Is it worth continuing SEO on this site or should I scrap the URL? I am worried that Google may take action on this site sometime in the future and all the work I will do will be lost.

He does have another website, because SEO's keeps trying to sell dentists microsites... This site isn't too bad but he doesn't own the URL but the url is a combination of the two doctors names and isn't easy to remember... and we would have to spend time trying to gain control of the URL.

Suggestions?

[AlanMosley]

Bing allowes you to diavow links, and Goolge is planning to do the same soon, so i would wait till then then disavow the links you dont trust.

[Joe_Nickdow]

Not knowing to much about the client I would probably just scrap it and start over for a few reasons.

1. If I'm understanding correctly the website is like dentist32432.com which feels a little spammy for me if I saw it in the SERP.  I think that something with his name or another more unique identifier may be more helpful.  In my SERP page I get a few results for urls like www.'townnamesmiles'.com and stuff like that. Try to get a domain that is creative and brand building.

2. The links probably aren't quality and not giving much advantage plus, who knows when google will roll out the link disavower and how it will work.  It may just hurt more in the long run. If he has any links from local organizations it probably won't be to hard to get them change them.

3.  I think a lot of people will just type 'dentist' in which case you get the big block of local results. I would try to optimize for that by trying to get some reviews, having a little social media thing going, etc...

This is all assuming the the current domain isn't ranking well and not driving business. However if it is and it's a competitive market I would take my chances with it.

Hope that helps.

[RobertFisher]

Hello Bob,

I agree with Alan re the hold off on scrapping the site. And, if there is a way to utilize what weight it does have, use KW research and see what type of quality domain that is exact match you can come up with. An example would be LodiCosmeticDentist.net, etc.  (Then use 301 redirects from Dentist90210.com as you know to do.)

Handling dental sites, I never use smiles, smile, teeth, etc. as they are not terms that are searched for and I prefer a domain have some semblance of a keyword in it, if not an exact match.

[MoosaHemani]

I agree with Alan and furthermore, I believe being an ethical SEO, your Job is to build quality links from relevant resources… in that case your job should be to build as many quality links as possible to make the link profile look natural… the more natural your link profile would be the more credibility it will have in the eye of Google and other search engines…

I believe you should continue with the current domain and start building quality links on it.

[Czubmeister]

This sounds like a good hybrid approach. Dentist+zip does sound spammy to me and using the doctors name in the URL doesn't give us any keywords we can use. I'll try to come up witha decent URL that looks both professional and keyword rich.

[TheeDigital]

I agree with Joseph and Robert, in saying that the title of your company sounds a bit spammy to begin with.  Maybe it's best if you use something along the lines of "ChicagoDentist.com" or even "ChicagoCosmeticDentistry.com" these allow you to use a keyword and sound more relavent to your audience.

I would also suggest starting  fresh and making an update to work on "local signals" such as Merchant Circle, Google Local, LocalEze.  These signals will help the page crawl up in local search and also allow other customers to review the company, which we all know in this day and age is a good thing.

As others have mentioned you do have the option of using a disavoy tool, but only Bing has such a tool right now and Bing only accounts for 38% of the search market, so you're going to be missing out on the other 70% and there's no way telling when Google will come out with such a tool.