Are negative reviews on Healthgrades hurting your reputation?
Have you “Googled” your name recently only to be shocked to find negative (and likely false) reviews on Healthgrades that are harming your reputation? Are you concerned that the negative reviews will have a detrimental impact on your professional career, reputation in the community, or ability to attract new patients to your practice? If so, we are here to help. This article outlines various strategies and tactics we have implemented for our clients over the past 7+ years to successfully remove negative reviews from Healthgrades.
*If you would like professional help in permanently removing negative reviews on Healthgrades as quickly and effectively as possible, please fill out our contact form or call us today at 855-239-5322 for a free consultation. All of our review removal services are guaranteed, and you only have to pay for results AFTER they have been achieved. It’s important to note that you typically only have one shot at getting a negative review removed – we are here to help!
What is Healthgrades?
Healthgrades is well known for launching the first comparative doctor rating database. The company was originally founded in 1998 and has utilized a broad range of data, including patient reviews, to evaluate health care providers. According to recent research, nearly half of all American healthcare patients visit healthgrades.com seeking trustworthy information to give them confidence in choosing a new physician or provider. Visitors can judge the skill, helpfulness, and overall reputation of a healthcare provider by reading patient reviews. For this reason, a negative, false, or defamatory review on Healthgrades can be very damaging to a doctor’s career.
Long gone are the days when doctors enjoyed a high degree of direct control over their reputations. Today, a doctor’s online reputation is squarely in the hands of patients, with around 90% of patients now trusting online reviews to help them make a decision on which doctor they want to see. Unsurprisingly, a single bad review on Healthgrades can significantly harm a doctor’s reputation, especially if the doctor hasn’t taken proactive measures to build their online reputation (most haven’t).
Today, patients can leave reviews online on a multitude of different medical review websites in addition to Healthgrades – such as zocdoc, vitals, and ratemds.com. In fact, because there are so many ways to leave reviews online, it’s no longer practical to manually keep track of what patients are saying about you online. Nonetheless, you need to stay informed so that you can quickly take steps to mitigate the damage of any negative reviews, and take control of your online reputation so you are not plagued by disgruntled patients throughout your career.
How do I completely remove my Healthgrades profile?
Most medical professionals do not ask to be on Healthgrades, and are surprised to see a profile created for them without their consent. Sites like Healthgrades take publicly available information about doctors, and host that information on their website. Under current U.S based laws, doctors do not have to give their consent or permission to have a profile created in their name, and to make matters worse – there is no way to remove your own profile from Healthgrades if you are actively practicing. Their policy is as follows:
“Healthgrades provides information on healthcare providers as a free service to consumers, patients and other healthcare professionals. In its provision of this service, Healthgrades aggregates information related to provider practices from publicly available sources. If you are a practicing provider and the published information regarding you or your practice is publicly available and of interest to the general public, Healthgrades’ policies prohibit complete removal of this information from Healthgrades.com.”
If you are retiring or no longer practicing, Healthgrades will make an exception and remove your profile if you contact their support team.
Why is my Healthgrades profile ranking so highly on Google?
It takes years for doctors to build a rock-solid reputation and only days for one negative review on Healthgrades to bring it all tumbling down. If you are a doctor, there is a high probability that your Healthgrades profile will rank on the first page of Google search results for your name (Dr. First Name + Last Name). You may be wondering why this is happening, especially if the Healthgrades link (that hosts the negative review) is ranking above other web properties that have existed for years. There are 3 main reasons why this occurs:
1. Clicks: The #1 search ranking factor in 2024 is the number of clicks a specific link gets over time. Generally speaking, the more clicks a link gets, the higher it will rank in search results. When patients search for your name, they are much more likely to click the Healthgrades link (than say your website or LinkedIn profile), which causes it to rank higher in search results.
2. Domain Authority: Every site on the Internet has a certain level of “trust” or “domain authority” on Google. The higher a site’s domain authority, the higher the site ranks in search results. The majority of medical review websites are highly trusted by Google, which is one of the reasons why your Healthgrades profile can quickly make its way to the top of search results.
3. Lack of content: If you have not actively worked to build up your online reputation as a doctor with websites you control, it is likely that the first page of search results for your name will be dominated by Healthgrades and other medical review sites. This puts you in a position where your online reputation is largely defined by your patients – and it is no mystery that the majority of reviews are left by patients that didn’t have a good experience.
Strategies to remove negative reviews on Healthgrades
Below is a list of various strategies and tactics we have implemented for our clients over the past 7+ years to completely remove negative, false, or defamatory reviews from Healthgrades or minimize their damage and visibility. It’s important to reiterate that you typically only have one shot at getting a review removed – if you are looking for professional assistance from real experts, please don’t hesitate to contact us at 855-239-5322 for a free consultation.
1. Healthgrades community review guideline violations:
The easiest way to potentially remove a negative review on Healthgrades is to contact the site directly and request removal of the review due to a violation of their community review guidelines. Healthgrades community guidelines expressly prohibit certain types of content on their website. The content that violates their guidelines is as follows:
- Don’t post content that is libelous, defamatory, harassing, threatening, or inflammatory.
- Don’t use obscenities, profanity, or express intolerance for others on the basis of race, ethnicity, nationality, gender, gender identity, religion, sexual orientation, age, or disability.
- Don’t post content that is obscene or lewd.
- Don’t post misleading, deceptive or fraudulent content.
- Don’t post content that contains personal information including phone numbers, email addresses, mailing addresses, full name, or other personal information.
- Don’t post content with personal website links or mentions.
- Don’t impersonate other people or organizations, or pretend to be someone or something you are not.
- Don’t engage in name-calling or personal attacks.
- Don’t post content that mentions or endorses specific brands including pharmaceuticals.
- Don’t post content mentioning legal matters or proceedings.
- If your review is rejected for violating our business or privacy rules, you can submit a new review.
2. Generate Positive Reviews on Healthgrades
The reality is, most negative reviews on Healthgrades are not eligible for removal, leaving you in a position where you must look for an alternative solution to fix the issue. One of the best strategies to repair the damage caused by negative reviews on Healthgrades is to consistently generate positive reviews from your happy patients. This tactic will allow you to push down any negative reviews(s) that can’t be removed, and increase your aggregate star rating on the site. Reviews on Healthgrades are categorized by “most recent” – so if you generate new positive reviews these will begin to show above the negative reviews. We offer positive review generation and review management services that can automate the entire process of consistently generating positive reviews from your patients (within HIPPA guidelines).
3. Suppress (push down) the Healthgrades link on Google
One of the best strategies to repair the damage caused by negative reviews on Healthgrades (and potentially other sites) is to suppress the links that host the reviews deeper in Google search results (page 2+) where they are unlikely to be seen.
The technical term for this process is “search engine suppression,” which involves creating a network of new positive web properties to push down the links that host the negative reviews while simultaneously building and protecting your online reputation as a medical professional. The timeframe to suppress a Healthgrades link to page 2+ of Google varies greatly and depends on several factors. In most cases, suppression is not only effective at removing the Healthgrades link from first page of search results, but it also works to strengthen your online reputation as a doctor and generate more patients that are searching for you.
4. Take legal action (NOT RECOMMENDED):
Even in situations where a blatantly false/defamatory review has been published, taking legal action is not recommended in the vast majority of situations due to the legal costs, time, uncertain outcome, and potential for making the problem worse. That being said, if a reviews is legally defined as defamatory, and Healthgrades refuses to remove the review – taking legal action is an option. We work with the top online defamation attorneys in the U.S. that can potentially assist in the matter if needed.
How we can help you
If a negative, false, or defamatory review on Healthgrades.com has damaged your reputation, our team of reputation experts can help. We have successfully helped hundreds of medical professionals permanently remove negative reviews on Healthgrades.
Reputation Resolutions is one of the few online reputation management firms in the industry offering a pay for performance solution to remove negative Healthgrades reviews. What does this mean? If you work with our company, you will only be charged for our service if we are successful in permanently removing the negative Healthgrades review(s) from your profile – you only pay for results.
WHY YOU SHOULD WORK WITH US:
Reputation Resolutions is proud to be rated as one of the top reputation online management firms in the U.S. by four independent agencies and is one of the few reputation management firms with an A+ rating from the Better Business Bureau. Furthermore, Reputation Resolutions has been selected to join the exclusive Google Partner Program and was also selected by Business.com as the #1 online reputation management firm for removing negative content and online attacks. To see reviews from past clients who have used our services, click here.
Benefits of working with the Reputation Resolutions Team:
- Work with a trusted and award-winning online reputation management company
- This is strictly a pay for performance service – if the Healthgrades review is not removed, you DON’T pay
- Payment is only required AFTER successful review removal.
- We expedite all of our removal services to ensure the negative review(s) is removed as quickly as possible
Get professional help to remove negative Healthgrades reviews today!
To learn more about how Reputation Resolutions can help you remove negative, false, or defamatory Healthgrades reviews, fill out the form below or call us today at (855)-239-5322 for a FREE consultation.
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