WebMD came out on the top of the "Top 10 Health, Fitness and Nutrition Destinations" list for the week ending September 10, 2006, as tracked by Nielsen//NetRatings.
Weight Watchers, the diet site, was in the No. 2 position.
In the list of the "Top 10 Health Advertisers" for the same week, Nielsen//NetRatings found that the diet companies Weight Watchers, NutriSystems and eDiets came in first, second and fifth, respectively.
All this brings up a question, of interest not just in the health and diet categories, but all businesses online: Are the most popular sites the best sites?
According to the "Rating the Diets" report from Consumer Reports, WebWatch and the Health Improvement Institute (HII), while many consumers are logging on to the Web for weight-loss advice, some diet sites are more helpful than others.
Now that may not be much of a surprise — but the fact that the Consumer Reports and HII raters found that the popularity (how often they were visited) of the Websites did not correspond to the quality of the sites is. In fact, the report states that more than a quarter of the Web's 20 top diet information sites — as ranked, again, by Nielsen//NetRatings — lack basic information about information sources, the degree to which advertising may or may not influence content on their site and the credentials or potential biases of their authors.
"Some of these sites, and sections of major sites, are excellent diet and weight-loss resources," Beau Brendler of Consumer Reports told SeniorJournal.com. "Others appear driven by marketing goals."
In order to give dieters better guidelines for choosing the sites that can best help them, Consumer Reports and HII staffers rated the top 20 most-trafficked diet sites, and the diet sections of major sites. They found that of the 20 most popular Web destinations, three were rated "excellent" — Aetna InteliHealth, MedicineNet.com and MayoClinic.com. Two received a "very good" rating — WebMD and the National Institutes of Health. And three were given a rating of "good" — eDiets.com, RealAge and WeightWatchers.com.
Raters made no attempt to judge the efficacy of the diets themselves; they only looked at site attributes such as content, authorship, references and transparency of editorial policies and scored accordingly. Only one site that was rated excellent by Consumer Reports and HII, MedicineNet.com, was in the top 10 most-popular sites list — and then only at No. 10.
A popularity poll may gauge popularity, but very little else, even online.
For a complete list of Consumer Reports WebWatch guidelines for Websites, click here.