By: Arthur Cooper
Submitted: 2011-02-09 00:02:20 | Word Count: 664
In the effort to live up to its promise and to combat the general lack of adequate filter in search engine results, Bing has selected content from only nine trusted medical sources for queries having to do with health.
Although that number seems incredibly limited, it’s easy to see why Bing has gone this route. There are literally millions of websites devoted to answering questions and offering advice related to medical conditions. A Google result for the generic phrase ‘back pain’ yields 143 million results. It isn’t easy for user to distinguish between rubbish and sound medical advice, particularly if they aren’t working in some sort of medical field.
[ advertisement ]
Yet this is a legitimate subject where millions of people need advice. Not surprisingly, they turn to the internet, just like they do for everything else. But trying to diagnose a rash on the internet is like trying to separate one droplet of water from an Olympic size pool. There are simply too many factors that a layperson knows nothing about.
Unfortunately, medical professionals are sick of what they call the WebMD syndrome. That’s when they have to deal with patients who think they have done due diligence by researching their symptoms on the internet, only to draw the absolutely wrong conclusions from their efforts. By the time they end up at the physician’s office, they have already diagnosed themselves and made a prognostication regarding their treatment. It can get pretty uncomfortable in the examination room trying to tell a patient that they don’t know what they’re talking about.
When it comes down to it, there is no substitute for 8 years of medical school and professional medical experience in the field. That’s apparently what Bing thinks as well, because they are limiting their results to the expert content generated by the Mayo Clinic, Medicine.net, Medstory, the National Institute of Health’s site Medline Plus, About.com, Wikipedia and others. This move will possibly allow Bing to make serious gains against Google as the population ages and higher quality medical information is needed by users.
Although some may wonder about the medical credentials of Wikipedia and About.com, the truth is that much of the content on those sites are written by professionals. About.com employs standards when selecting an author of a particular topic and Wikipedia has come a long way from being the laughing stock of encyclopedias where anyone could post completely incorrect information, to being given a thumbs up for accuracy by leading industry experts asked to assess its content by The Guardian.
Though they claim to be working on it, Google has received negative attention for not being able to separate substantive content from useless, even dangerous information. The most famous example of this in recent memory concerns a merchant who was able to leverage negative criticism from customers to get higher rankings in Google’s SERP. The merchant even went as far as stalking clients and threatening them with violence. Each time they posted a negative review in an online forum, it generated lots of feedback and boosted the company’s rankings, effectively rewarding the merchant for bad behavior. Google claims that they have adjusted their algorithms for negative content, but Bing’s approach wouldn’t even demand that tactic.
The long and short of it for online businesses whose main focus is health is this: if you are not one of the 9 trusted sources, don’t even bother trying to rank on Bing; if you are trying to rank on Google, make sure your content is valid and that you treat your customers with respect. At Optimum7, we provide Reputation Management and SEO to address these issues for our clients in the Health Sector. Contact us today if you need assistance, we can help. Call us today at 1-800-736-9618
