Health site, could you outrank webmd? the CDC?

[outwest]

Would these sites be hard to outrank since they are well established with tons of backlinks to the main domain, and high PR and 10+ yr old domains

assuming they are not optimized for the keywords?
Market samurai says
N N N N
on the keyword?

[John Williamson]

G ranks pages, not sites. Totally depends on the page you're trying to rank and whether or not you think you can do better than the factors that the WebMD pages have in place. I would bet that for some keywords you could definitely outrank them, for other popular ones maybe not.

[MattinSD]

To provide a brief answer to your question - not necessarily. I'm new to IM, have had very little idea of what I'm doing over these first few months, and have still successfully outranked both WebMD and CDC pages for multiple keywords in two different health niches.

As John said, the strength of the domain is not the major factor in being able to outrank a page - it's whether or not you can optimize better for the specific keyword than your competition has.

[ichl13]

One of my sites actually ranked above webmd for a particular keyword but that was because their page wasn't optimized at all for the keyword. So the answer to your question is yes.

[futuremills]

Of course you can, you will just have to work very hard on your SEO to outrank those sites.

[NoobAdsenseWarrior]

Im no expert or seasoned pro been doing IM for about 5months now just learning the ropes and iv managed to rank well not first but should get there soon and the sites in the top 10 are bbc, bupa, nhs, allergy uk, net doctor, patient + some others which are massive sites with very high pr but none are theys are targeting the keyword and have very little backlinks to that page, the only thing im concerned with is if there targeting the keyword (has to be exact) if they are whats total backlinks to that page and whats there onsite seo if you can beat all those you can easily rank for that KW,
Make sure you check the backlinks though!

Paul

[yukon]

Originally Posted by outwest

Would these sites be hard to outrank since they are well established with tons of backlinks to the main domain, and high PR and 10+ yr old domains

assuming they are not optimized for the keywords?
Market samurai says
N N N N
on the keyword?

What do you see when you do this search, replace the keyword with your own keyword that you are trying to rank.

intitle:"bipolar disorder treatment" inurl:"bipolar disorder treatment" site:www.webmd.com

If webmd was ranking #1 for your target keyword (example: bipolar disorder treatment), a good starting place is to see how many pages they are trying to actually rank in the SERPs.

The search above returns 3 very targeted pages on webmd for that example keyword. If that number was something like 103 pages that they are trying to rank, it might be a bit of a headache. Check the type of backlinks each of those pages have in the search results.

It can always be done, you just have to decide If an easier keyword exist or do you just have to have that exact keyword.