Comments on: Media News Group Adds Health Vertical

By: Mike

Mike — Fri, 02 May 2008 18:34:29 +0000

My point was that few consumers are going to visit the white-labeled pages since a) they don’t think of a newspaper as a source for general health information, so regular site users will not provide any significant traffic b) it’s tough to imagine that this content will rank very highly on search engines.

Perhaps with the buildout of more local content, progress could be made on both of these challenges. However, I think in order to built up any search engine ranking, you’ll have to change the domain structure of the sites from being subdomains of the taumed.com domain to being subdomains of each newspaper property’s site (e.g. http://health.connpost.com). This will take advantage of the local authority of those site domains, and also potentially mitigate duplicate content issues (current connpost site doesn’t appear to be indexing very well; it may be early yet, but do a search for “site:connpost.taumed.com” on Google…)

By: Tauseef

Tauseef — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 20:56:34 +0000

Hi Mike, Thank you for the comment. By search driven we do not mean a search box. We mean that the personalization is powered using search algorithms. We power all widgets and personalization using search algorithms. This approach allows users to be connected with related information from all of the sources and content types regarding of what they are viewing on the site.

By: Mike

Mike — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 22:37:37 +0000

Miami Herald is a McClatchy paper…

In my experience, this type of content doesn’t draw much traffic for newspaper sites. As Bashir says, it’s a search driven space, and we all know where most health-related searches are being done. The layout is pretty cluttered and critical mass required for it to become a true community is difficult to gain.

Other than that, it’s great! ;)