How To Judge The Credibility of Health Sites - 10 Tips To Help Weed Out SPAM Sites

As we've been blogging about quite a bit recently(here, here, and here), SPAM sites (and the practice of Spandexing) are cluttering up the Web and making it more difficult for people to find the very best health information available.

Now that most people go online to search for health information, it goes without saying that people need access to credible sites from trustworthy sources.

The good news is there are now so many great resources for safe and useful health information. There are also thousands of bloggers and health communities where people are sharing helpful advice, recommendations, and inspirational stories.

The bad news, is that the bad guys (spammers and black-hat search engine optimizers) are creating their own blogs, infiltrating forums, and developing scraper sites to try and make money from advertising or sell products. All of this added clutter, coupled with the sophistication of many spammers, is making it harder to distinguish between quality sources and sites just trying to sell something.

Don't get us wrong.  Just because a Web site is trying to sell a health product or make money from advertising doesn't mean it is a spam site. In fact some of the best health information sites available are now created and paid for from educational grants from pharmaceutical companies. And virtually all of the top health portals feature extensive advertising.

But the reality is there are now tens of thousands of fake blogs, scraper sites, marketing scams and other unsavory sites created for the sole purpose of making money -- not for trying to provide people safe and credible information so they can make better health decisions.

So what is spamdexing anyway?

According to wikipedia, spamdexing is any of various methods to manipulate the relevancy or prominence of resources indexed by a search engine, usually in a manner inconsistent with the purpose of the indexing system. It is a form of search engine optimization.

It can often be very hard for search engines to distinguish the difference between a good Web site, and one that uses optimized content, meta-tags, and other techniques to try and rank well alongside the top ranked sites. Since many search engines are not doing a good enough job at weeding out all of the spam these days (just do any health search on Technorati or Google Blog Search and you'll quickly see what we mean), it is essential that anyone searching for health information pay attention to the source of information and learn how to spot a spam site.

Here are 10 Tips to Help You Judge The Credibility of A Health Site:

1) Is the source of the health information clearly identified?
If it isn't easy to find out who authored the content, post, or site, then skip it.  Any credible health information provider will clearly label who created the content.  For evidence-based health information ("expert" content), some of the trusted sources are Healthwise, A.D.A.M., National Cancer Institute, Multum, Cleveland Clinic, Mayo Clinic, etc. You can find this content on sites like WebMD, Revolution Health, Yahoo! Health, and Health Central to name just a few credible health portals.

For blogs and user-created content, often the most trustworthy information comes from people who are patient advocates or health bloggers who make their contact information and a short bio available to clearly identify who they are, their motivations, and expertise.  We search for wisdom from people who share these details because it adds an additional level of trust, credibility and even inspiration for the readers.

2) Does the information seem reasonable and is it useful?
Common sense is your best bet to spotting spam sites. While computers can't always spot the junk sites, humans often can.  If the information seems too good to be true than it probably is.  Whenever in doubt, check for other sources and print out the information to ask your doctor questions.

3) Does the site feature a credibility seal from HON or have accreditation from URAC?
Health on the Net and URAC only offer seals to trusted health Web sites that follow strict guidelines and policies.  The challenge here is that most blogs do not have these seals. But many health forums, support groups, and community sites do.

4) Does the site clearly state its privacy policy?
If you are using a health information site and are asked to share personal information make sure to read the privacy policy. To be safe only use sites that feature privacy policy seals from TrustE or BBB.

5) Does the site link to or feature other credible sources of health information?
Lots of spam sites create what are known as link farms and multiple blogs on similar topics.  They all simply link back and forth to one another.  A massive mess of clutter.  Be careful here, however, as some scraper sites will literally copy word for word some of the information from credible sources and mix in their marketing messages alongside the content they stole from legitimate sources.

6) Does the site have good Google Rank or Authority on Technorati?
Google ranks sites on a scale of zero to ten. Sites that are too new will often have a Google Rank of zero. Technorati has a feature that shows the Authority of a blog by indicating the number of other sites that link to it.  These tools can be useful, but by no means foolproof.

7) Is the site trying to sell something or is it featuring too much advertising?
Often the easiest way to distinguish a useful health site from a spam site is to check if the site has an agenda.  Is it trying to get you to buy a particular product incessantly? Does it seem like the advertising messages are mixed in too closely with the information? Is there a company or product sponsoring the site? Does the sales message overpower the educational message? The best health sites, blogs and communities have the goal of trying to provide useful information to help people, not just sell a product.

8) Are their editorial and community guidelines posted?
This won't help much with blogs, but the best health sites and communities make clear their editorial guidelines, terms of service, and advertising policies.  If the health site looks like it doesn't have any of this information than it could be a fly-by night operation or a scraper site.

9) Is the information dated or have a time stamp?
Most blogs do this automatically, but health sites should make it easy for people to see when the information was most recently updated.

10) Check the web address.
Often times, spam sites will use URL redirects to automatically take you from one health site to another site.  If the domain name looks like a weird address with lots of numbers and dashes, it should give you pause.

There are many other ways to judge the credibility and quality of health information. We'd love your suggestions and ideas to add to our list.