Links a Medical Reviewer Would Sign Off On

Meridian had been publishing condition guides for two years and ranking behind content farms for nearly all of them. The site was medically accurate and reviewed internally, but none of that was visible to a search engine or to anyone else — no named authors, no credentials on the page, and 38 referring domains, over half of them health directories that link to everybody.

The available link opportunities were the problem rather than the shortage. Health is the vertical with the most guest-post supply and the least of it usable: sites that publish anything, on any condition, from any author, at a price. Taking any of them would have been actively worse than the 38 they had.

The prospect list was built by exclusion. Anything that solicited health contributions was cut, which removed roughly nine in ten. What remained were publications with an editor, a medical reviewer, and a published correction policy — thirty-one of them, for a nine-month programme.

Their clinical lead's credentials went onto the site first, as a real author entity with bylines, a profile, and consistent attribution everywhere their name appeared externally. That work produced no links at all and made every subsequent pitch answerable, because the question a health editor asks is who wrote this, not what is the domain rating.

Placements were mostly citations inside someone else's piece rather than posts of ours. Forty-one over nine months is a low number and each one took a fortnight of correspondence. Links pointed at the reviewed guides until month eight, and only then at the condition pages that carried commercial intent.

DR moved 34 to 52 off 41 placements — a poor ratio by volume and a good one by what those domains were. Twenty-two condition terms reached the top three, most of them displacing aggregators rather than other clinics.

Organic sessions rose 212%. The more useful figure internally was that appointment enquiries from organic rose 147%, which is lower, and the difference is people reading a condition guide with no intention of booking anything. That is what a health site's traffic largely is.

The author work is the part that transferred. Three of their clinicians now get approached directly for comment, which produces links nobody had to pitch for.