Your Psychology Today profile is not a backlink

If you have a private practice, someone has told you that your Psychology Today profile is good for SEO. Usually the reasoning is that it gives you a backlink from a big, trusted website, and backlinks are how you rank.

The first half is right. Psychology Today is enormous and Google trusts it. The second half is where it falls apart.

What is actually in the code

Open any therapist's Psychology Today profile and look at the "My website" button. Here is what the link looks like underneath:

<a class="aag-website-link" href="/us/profile/98389/website" rel="nofollow">

Two things are going on, and both matter.

The link does not point at the therapist's website. It points at a page on psychologytoday.com, which then forwards the visitor on. So the connection between the profile and the practice site is not a direct link at all.

And it carries rel="nofollow", which is an explicit instruction to search engines: do not pass any ranking credit through this link.

That is not an oversight. It is how nearly every large directory is built, because handing out ranking authority to thousands of profiles is the fastest way to become a link farm. Psychology Today is protecting itself, sensibly.

The practical result is simple. Your profile passes no ranking authority to your website. If someone sold you a Psychology Today listing as an SEO backlink, that specific claim was wrong.

So does it help at all?

Yes, and it is worth paying for. Just not for the reason you were given.

It ranks in places you cannot. Search for a therapist in almost any town and the first page is thick with directories. Those pages are built to win exactly that search, and a single practice website usually cannot outrank them. Your profile is how you appear on that page anyway. You are not beating the directory. You are showing up inside it.

It catches people searching your name. Someone gets your name from a friend, a doctor, a school counsellor. They type it into Google. Your Psychology Today profile very often comes up, sometimes before your own site. That is a second front door, and it is answering a person who is already looking for you specifically.

It sends real people. Referral traffic is not a ranking signal and it does not need to be. Inquiries are the point. A profile that brings you two calls a month is doing its job whether or not Google gives it any credit.

You are renting their space

Every search where your profile shows up is a search where you appear on a page next to every other therapist in your area, on a website you do not control, which is monetising your presence there. The directory captures the ranking. You get the click, if you win it against the twelve people listed around you.

That is a reasonable deal. It is not a bad thing to be listed. But it is a different arrangement from owning the result yourself, and the difference matters when you are deciding where the next hour of effort goes.

Where the ranking actually moves

If you want to rank for the searches that bring you clients, the work happens in two places, and neither of them is a directory.

Your Google Business Profile. For local searches on a phone, the map results appear above everything else, and they are drawn almost entirely from your Google Business Profile rather than your website. Primary category, services written the way clients search, hours, booking link. Most of the profiles I open have half of that blank.

Your own site. The page title that says what you treat and where you are. A page for each thing you actually do, in the words a person would type. A phone number someone can find. These are unglamorous and they are what moves.

What to do with the profile you already have

Keep it. Fill it in properly. Treat it as a lead source, which it genuinely is, and stop treating it as a ranking strategy, which it never was.

Then put the SEO effort where the ranking actually comes from. Your own site and your Google listing are the two things you own, and they are the two things a directory can never do for you.

If you want someone to look at yours and tell you which of these is the weak one, that is what the intro call is for.

Let's get found.