Technology

Cervical cancer vaccine: how to find out more

Malcolm Coles has been running an excellent series of posts highlighting how inaccurate and fear-mongering information about the cervical cancer jab (the vaccine against HPV) has been spreading online.

As he points out, the official NHS page about the cervical cancer jab does not come out as well in search results as it might. So he’s made an excellent suggestion:

Please, if you have any way to publish a web page (you have a blog, say, or you work somewhere that publishes online), then link to these URLs:

  • http://www.nhs.uk/conditions/hpv-vaccination/Pages/Introduction.aspx
  • http://www.immunisation.nhs.uk/Vaccines/HPV
  • http://www.nhs.uk/news/2009/09September/Pages/Cervical-cancer-vaccine-QA.aspx

Ideally, use some link text like cervical cancer jab or cervical cancer vaccine to link to those pages…

The more of us who link to it, the higher in Google’s results that page will appear, counteracting the ill-informed media scaremongering. My aim is to get these NHS pages into the top 10, and preferably top 3, of a search for relevant terms.

(In case you’re wondering – yes, this is what NHS staff want to see happen.)

Many other bloggers have already taken up this challenge. Why not join them? If you’ve got your own site or blog, it’ll only take a moment – but it’ll be a valuable contribution to getting accurate health information to people who need it.

[Note: the NHS page referred to and originally linked to from this piece no longer exists.]

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