Imedwiki:Blog/2023-03 Imedwiki on google

Imedwiki on google search - draft

This is a draft, article in development

I use google search console to see how Imedwiki pages get displayed and found on google. The presence of Imedwiki content on search engines has been rather weak. That seemed ok for the moment as content is slowly developing and in correspondence with development there has been a slight increase in search engine hits. Last october though I was surprised by a rapid decline in impressions and clicks as shown in the screenshot above. A little research on the web showed that there had been an update in googles spam algorithm. This seems to have affected the way Imedwiki is represented in googles search results, seemingly as spam. Just now I can only speculate about the reasons. Either it is formal reasons like too many imported articles from wikipedia or it is related to the integrative medical content.

A website states "Finally, Google’s Spam Update also works to reduce duplicate content. This refers to when there are multiple versions of the same content on different websites or web pages. This can be used to manipulate rankings, as well as reduce the quality of search engine results. Google’s Spam Update will seek out and penalize websites that are using these types of practices." As Imedwiki has imported content from Wikipedia this might be a reason to downrate the site. This is sad as wikipedias licensing allows importing to imedwiki and a main concept of imedwiki is to provide a pluralistic overview including perspectives found on wikipedia and extending and/or modifying them. If importing from wikipedia would lead to being marked as Spam this concept would need to be reviewed.

The other integrative medical option, that integrative medical content in itself might have led to the downgrade is possible but rather speculative. If other integrative medical sites would have seen a similar downgrade this might be taken into consideration. Neutral representation of integrative medical content on the internet is difficult but as long as there is no certain proof for this as a cause I assume that it is rather other factors at play.

I will look into this question furthermore. Some preliminary results: One article mentions changes in visibility for alternative medicine sites in 2018: "This change was a radical departure for Google in 2018 because it meant that alternative-health sites that used to rank for medical queries stopped ranking for those queries. Those sites were not a part of the medical category, they were a part of the alternative-health category." This article states past changes in respect to alternative medicine.

In the long run it would be good that the pages of imedwiki can easily be found on search engines. My main perspective is good high quality content and I am somewhat unwilling to step away from that principle due to rules made up by search engines. Right now to get pages like the main page found on google it's necessary to search for "imedwiki integrative medicine" and afterwards select to not search for "imed wiki" but imedwiki to get the imedwiki page on integrative medicine displayed in the search results at all.

The development of the search results showed the power of algorithms to me and how easily a decision by a company can have huge impact on a project.

I'd like to better understand this issue so this post might pose as a basis for exchange. Please add comments, suggestions, similar experiences at the discussion page.

Christoph Holtermann