Fellow blogger Malcolm Coles is conducting a medical experiment, but you’re more likely to see the results in New Media Age than The Lancet.
Following death this week of a teenage girl moments after she had been immunized against cervical cancer, Coles noted how many of the papers had failed to offer a balanced account of events, implying that the vaccination and the death were linked when at best there was no proof.
As we now know, the tragic death was later attributed to an unrelated tumour. Too late for the papers – and too late for the aggregator of the newspapers, Google.
Of course Google didn’t author any of these stories but it does disseminate – and Coles wants those stories off the top of search and Google News results pages.
The solution?
He wants as many bloggers as possible to post about the jab, and rather than link to some scurrilous story, they should instead link to this NHS cervical cancer vaccine page.
The more inbound links, the higher the page rank, the more likely that particular NHS page is to appear on page one of Google.
The net result (no pun intended) is that concerned parents scouring the internet for information will more likely see the informed advice.
As I blog, the NHS cervical cancer vaccine page (oops, I’ve linked to it again), has yet to make Google page one but an NHS Q&A has. And someone – the Department of Health presumably – has bought a sponsored ad.
But none of this should stop the experiment. Go link…
Related:
– Google Fast Flip Verdict – Good News For Users, Bad News For Newspapers
– Google Ads. FAIL
– BBC Goes Crowdsourcing To Save The NHS
Jon Bernstein 