A couple years back I remember reading a USA Today article featuring the popularity of pro-anorexia websites. These are websites that support girls who are leading an anorexic or bulimic lifestyle. The websites have tips for eating less than 200 calories a day and images of waif thin women as a means to inspire the visitors. One website touted the famous tagline - “nothing tastes better than thin.” I remember at the time using Google to look up these websites and I had to enter the exact name of the website or specifically spell our “pro-anorexia” to find the site. They were mostly buried below the websites with “real” support for the disease.
However, just today I typed in “anorexia support” into Google and I was surprised to see with all the public health messaging out there - a “pro-anorexia” site was the third one listed in the results! This means that young women searching the net for information about anorexia are actually being presented with sites that support and encourage their dangerous behavior. If you do a search for just the term “anorexia” the 7th result listed is “The World’s Largest Pro Anorexia Site - 24 Hour Posting”. (hosted by live journal - way to go guys!). I should also mention that this title is much more captivating than the site listed in the results above - “Anorexia Nervosa”, “Anorexia Symptoms”, etc.
S o what does this google searching ranking tell us about the community supporting these Pro Ana sites? Google bases it’s search ranking on the meaningfulness of the website content as well as the number of incoming links a website has. This shows there is a very strong community supporting these websites, adding content, and creating a network for links. Back in the post 2.0 days the sites were strictly informative. But now with blogging platforms like live journal young women can provide each other with instant feedback. A couple sample quotes from the site:
“Instead of going out I’m stayin in my apartment and eating an orange for dinner.”
“Anyone know how I can make myself throw up more? Please hurry if you have any advice at all. My body is asorbing fat as we speak!!!”
I’m always touting the wonderful education benefits of the the read/write web but I guess this is a great example of the danger of instant feedback and social networks when they are based around an unhealthy behavior.
Your thoughts?
October 5th, 2007 at 10:44 pm
Hey Susan,
I couldn’t help commenting.
“Google bases it’s search ranking on the… number of incoming links a website has.”
Which is very true, and which is why you should add the rel=”nofollow” tag to the link to the live journal. The nofollow tag was developed to prevent comment spam, but now is being used by SEO’s to prevent passing on link juice to sites they don’t support. This way your not increasing that sites search ranking.
October 5th, 2007 at 10:48 pm
Thanks for the comment Brian! I’m definitely not trying to support these sites. I added the tag to the link!