Doctors Warn About Relying Too Much on Google
This morning, Tracie Biggerstaff pointed out an article over at Search Engine Land entitled “Doctors Warn About Relying Too Much on Google. In this article, a study is discussed and points out that the quality of content in health-related search queries is not great. Non-profit sites score highest, followed by academic sites, and non-sales-oriented commercial sites (like WebMD). This study further stated that newspaper articles and personal websites typically held the least accurate information. Finally, “commercial sites with a financial interest in the diagnosis, such as those sponsored by companies selling a drug or treatment device, were very common but frequently incomplete.”
About 20 percent of the sites that turned up in the top ten results were sponsored sites,” Dr. Karunakar says. “These site owners are motivated to promote their product, so the information found there may be biased. We also found that these sites rarely mentioned the risks or complications associated with treatment as they are trying to represent their product in the best possible light.
I would take exception to the comment that sponsored sites provide biased information without mentioning risks or complications associated with treatment. Obviously all drug companies want to promote their products in the best possible light, but all drug companies also have some very specific guidelines they must follow in order to promote anything. These are guidelines imposed by the FDA which ensure “fair balance” disclosures (i.e., whenever benefits are mentioned, risks must also be mentioned in an equally prominent position).
While this study was focused specifically on sports medicine information, the findings can be largely applicable across all health-based search queries. Running my own searches on a variety of diseases and conditions, I find that the results largely fall into the same general buckets on Google:
- Google OneHealth Box
- Commercial sites with no sales goals (Wikipedia, MedicineNet, MayoClinic, WebMD, eMedicineHealth)
- Nonprofit sites (associations, government sites, educational journals, etc)
- News/blog sites
- Pharma-sponsored sites (very rare…less than 20% of all searches)
What’s this Mean for Pharmaceutical SEO?
The implications of this study and report are pretty significant from a SEO perspective. First and foremost, this study takes a direct shot at Google (and Yahoo as well) by stating that the quality of content found during searches for high volume health-related terms is not high quality content. For search engines, this is a concern because their goal is to provide the most relevant content about any given topic (based on very sophisticated algorithms that rank sites based on various factors). Traditionally speaking, SEO criteria are more strongly considered by the above sites in comparison to pharmaceutical-sponsored websites. Pharmaceutical companies tend to leverage search through sponsored listing (or paid search, PPC) rather than through natural search. This is despite the fact that a majority of people tend to click more frequently on natural search results.
This report once again points out the fact that pharma SEO could be a potential opportunity for any pharma company willing to follow the principles of SEO. Give the users and search engines what they want – content that is relevant and valuable. This can potentially improve natural search visibility by increased rankings, growth of inbound links, and through social media channels. Search and social share the same primary goal of distributing content to the most relevant users at the right time. Any pharma company that buys in to that theory will have a winning formula for potential enhanced search and social performance.
