Last week, The New York Times published a thought-provoking editorial about the pros and cons of Google’s search engine algorithm being subjected to some type of regulation or government scrutiny.

Antitrust investigations of Google’s search engine algorithms in Europe might have prompted some to consider the need for search engine regulation—but how might that help or hurt healthcare and hospital marketing and its “customer,” the patient?

I don’t want to engage in an economic/political debate about the merits or evils of government regulation in free enterprise. Instead, I was particularly intrigued with this sentence: “When Google engineers tweak its supersecret algorithm—as they do hundreds of times a year—they can break the business of a Website that is pushed down the rankings.”

It’s always a bit uncomfortable to perceive hospitals as “businesses” and patients as “consumers” or “customers.” Even as a healthcare and hospital marketing and SEO specialist whose job requires seeing healthcare from both perspectives, I still resist any cynicisms and truly believe that hospitals and their staffs do what they do because of their passion for improving people’s lives, rather than purely or even primarily because of financial gain.

However, in the context of Websites and search engines, the “hospital as a business” is a very appropriate perspective.

Within that context, hospitals depend on Websites so that customers can find them—but also vice versa. And it’s that “vice versa” that makes whatever Google does to constantly improve its search engine results pages (SERPs) that should never be tampered with by outside forces—even if it does create (or sustain) challenges with maintaining hospital Website SEO.

Google Caffeine Redux

Earlier this month, we blogged about how the new Google Caffeine Web indexing system will affect hospital SEO and SERP rankings. This is perhaps one of the more significant recent events that can very easily “break the business of a Website” and affect its rankings.

And to that, I say “Good.”

Along with my faith in the benevolence of hospitals, I also have faith that Google wants to deliver a search engine that truly levels the playing field and discourages (or at least disrupts) unethical and black hat SEO practitioners.

As it always has, Google rewards Websites that provide relevant content—and for people in search of solutions, services and other information that relates to their health and well being, the “Google way” is one that benefits healthcare “customers.”

As long as Google stays out of the healthcare industry and doesn’t attract the attention of antitrust regulators (like it has in Europe because of accusations of unfair placements of links for its affiliates like Google Maps or YouTube), from a healthcare marketing perspective, there is no need regulate Google’s algorithms. It ain’t broken, so don’f fix it.

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This entry was posted on Friday, July 23rd, 2010 at 9:51 am and is filed under Analytics and Metrics, SEO. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.