STUFF

RxSearch

What happens when a domain that was previously used for an online pharmacy and has a spammy history is used as a search site for RxNorm drugs?

Apart from some lessons learned, not much.

Summary
URLsftpharmacy.com
TypeRxNorm medical drugs search site
Domain historyExpired domain; large number of spammy backlinks
TimeJuly - present
StatusOngoing: observing, no further development.
Learnings
  • Very reasonable page speed considering that some queries require multiple API calls in successive steps.
  • A sitemap with 20 sample pages, cross-references and structured data markup (sitelinks search box) was used to help search engines discover new content. This worked nicely.
  • Google and Bing handle indexing very differently. While Google actively crawls the site and seems to use the keyword search box, Bing doesn't index pages at all. Whether this is because Google is more advanced in crawling sites or because the domain history is too spammy to be considered trustworthy by Bing is unclear. It is worth noting that sites that provide medical information are viewed more critically than others.