Imedwiki:Blog/2023-03 Imedwiki on google

Imedwiki on google search

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 this development there has been an accordant 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 dealing with search engine optimization 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 includes some 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 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 when writing this: 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." There is another article which 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 on google last october showed me the power of algorithms and how easily a decision by a company can have huge impact on a project.

The further design of Imedwiki will need to deal with the way search engines work, do as much search engine optimization as needed. It may not disturb the main quality goals of the project though. Producing high quality content will be the main objective. This is not for search engines but for the people reading the pages (but if no one finds the content, no one will read it). It might make sense to remove article pages that are purely imports from wikipedia and to reference wikipedia. If there are just small changes or additions to an article that is otherwise mainly imported from wikipedia it might make sense to keep only the differences here and link wikipedia for the rest. Some kind of template for this could be developed. There should be a project page dealing with this topic.

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

Thinking about this for quite some time I think one main lesson to take out of this is to focus on presenting the specific content of integrative medicine. Integrative medicine being more than the sum of its parts. Trying not to replicate what exists elsewhere but showing and filling the gaps in existing presented knowledge and building bridges.

Christoph Holtermann