__/ [ canadafred ] on Wednesday 01 March 2006 19:50 \__
> "Roy Schestowitz" <newsgroups@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
> news:du4men$ahd$1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
>> 'There is a new and insidious threat to the World Wide Web: a slowly
>> rising
>> tide of "original content" on Internet sites that is at best worthless,
>> and
>> at worst possibly even dangerously inaccurate.'
>>
>>
http://online.wsj.com/public/article/SB114116587424585798-0qH9qUYuUug__vRSFKGvxIEwLGw_20070301.html?mod=blogs
>
> Thanks for the article Roy. I really appreciate that when you post these
> interesting links.
Thanks, Fred. I was hoping it would generate a discussion. Like you, I am
bothered by the amount of fake content on the Web. What we probably fail to
see is the fact that the _large majority_ of public pages are attempts to
hijack traffic, for ego and stats vanity. No-one with a pile of 100,000
lyrics pages could attain true contentment receiving traffic. This whole
scenario makes some content creators (Webmasters) nothing more than traffic
realtors.
Many unoriginal pages are filtered out or never indexed, so there is
resistance to letting it in. If it ever percolates, it poisons the indices.
Would it be fair to estimate that the amount of crawlable content out there
is 90% unoriginal, but only a small proportion of it is getting picked up,
say 10%? In the WordPress Forums, we have had some sharks who needed help
assembling thousands of pages with minimal effort or automatically
converting external feeds to pages.
> My take on this. I come across keyphrase competitors that build these huge
> "machines", often carbon copy content derived from other sources. the
> frequently are "network" linked to a huge pool of sites that are doing
> precisely the same thing. They work together to take the first page of
> results and cause a roadblock for legitimate keyphrase competitors. The
> fact is, from a spam SEO perspective, this is effective today. This, we
> hope, may not tomorrow but for today, many of these beasts sit on their
> thrones, appearing satisfied in their dominations. But they are becoming
> complacent.
>
> The sad thing is that the web searcher doesn't get the variety of choices
> he / she deserves. Instead of being offered a smorgasbord of precisely
> matched quality sites, they get pointed to the dumpster and instructed to
> eat there. This used to tick me off to no end.
>
> It is a technique that works well, how could this be adapted in ethical
> SEO? That's the question I ask myself. We talk about this all the time
> here. Build quality content, original stuff. Add more pages regularly to
> the web sites. But one good writer cannot possibly write as much material
> as a team of "Third World" english students ( that's the nice way of
> putting it ). When will the SEs figure this out? Eventually, I hope. Funny
> thing is, we encourage this practice. Who pays for these "writers"?
As long as financial incentive is there, the dumpster will expand. When
search engines pull out the 'life support', plagiarism will be discouraged,
leading the offenders to shrivel in their boots.
> As Lee Gomes points out in his article "Curious to learn more about the
> process, I bid on some writing jobs on the Web sites where these
> transactions occur. ( I described myself quite honestly: as a Journal
> reporter interested in freelance work who might also write a Journal story
> about writing for Web sites. ) I managed to get underbid on numerous jobs
> before snaring one from a Web entrepreneur I would come to know as "<snip>"
> I would have to write 50 articles, each 500 words long. Topics to be
> assigned. Pay: $100. For everything."
> What kind of author could possibly write 50-500 word articles for $100?
> That would take me a week, if I managed to stay focused that long.
>
> Once in a while, I'll run into keyphrase competitors that stands alone
> against the tide of challengers for top positions. It is almost refreshing
> to see this. The lone warrior is a rare bird indeed, ever having to defend
> it's integrity against the conglomerates of the mediocre, which often rely
> on the oppressed to generate unethical content.
>
> The worst part to me is that directly or indirectly, the SERPs are
> supporting this.
Yes, but how can this ever be prevented? If it carries on like this, the Net
will continue to see a rise in spam (see an item I just wrote yesterday:
http://schestowitz.com/Weblog/archives/2006/03/01/spam-varieties/ ) and
search results will be very irrelevant. The whole backlinks system will
collapse. It is then that a second Web, or an (electronic) library with
peer-reviewed journals should begin to rise. The net will lose its
credibility and, as you suggest, be perceived as a dumpster of dross and
drivel.
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