(Article) Worthless Content Blamed on Search Engines

'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...ml?mod=blog s

On Wed, 01 Mar 2006 18:41:18 +0100, Roy Schestowitz
<newsgroups (AT) schestowitz (DOT) com> wrote:

'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...ml?mod=blog s

That's where the "authority sites" approach should work (at least in
theory).

Best,
Borek
--
http://www.chembuddy.com
http://www.bpp.com.pl

__/ [ Borek ] on Wednesday 01 March 2006 17:54 \__

On Wed, 01 Mar 2006 18:41:18 +0100, Roy Schestowitz
newsgroups (AT) schestowitz (DOT) com> wrote:

'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...ml?mod=blog s

That's where the "authority sites" approach should work (at least in
theory).

Best,
Borek

*Exactly* my thought. By the way, check out the splendid analogy at the end:

"...Google, for example, says its mission is "to organize the world's
information and make it universally accessible and useful." The way that's
written, one thinks perhaps of a satellite orbiting high above the earth,
capturing all its information but interfering with nothing.

In fact, search engines are more like a TV camera crew let loose in the
middle of a crowd of rowdy fans after a game. Seeing the camera, everyone
acts boorishly and jostles to get in front. The act of observing something
changes it."

Nothing new really, it has been happening for the past year or so. It just
now got bad enough for the WSJ to notice it I guess. Getting so half the
results you get on searches are worthless "phony content" and/or scraper
sites, or sites full of SE spam that are only for selling Google Adspace.

---------------------------------------------------------------------
"Roy Schestowitz" <newsgroups (AT) schestowitz (DOT) com> wrote

'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...ml?mod=blog s

"Roy Schestowitz" <newsgroups (AT) schestowitz (DOT) com> wrote

'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...ml?mod=blog s

Thanks for the article Roy. I really appreciate that when you post these
interesting links.

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 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.

--

Fred canadian_web (AT) hotmail (DOT) com
Ethical SEO Tips, Tools and Resources
www.rezultz-web-site-promotion.com

On Wed, 01 Mar 2006 17:59:28 +0000, Roy Schestowitz
<newsgroups (AT) schestowitz (DOT) com> wrote:

__/ [ Borek ] on Wednesday 01 March 2006 17:54 \__

On Wed, 01 Mar 2006 18:41:18 +0100, Roy Schestowitz
newsgroups (AT) schestowitz (DOT) com> wrote:

'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...ml?mod=blog s

That's where the "authority sites" approach should work (at least in
theory).

Best,
Borek

*Exactly* my thought. By the way, check out the splendid analogy at the end:

"...Google, for example, says its mission is "to organize the world's
information and make it universally accessible and useful." The way that's
written, one thinks perhaps of a satellite orbiting high above the earth,
capturing all its information but interfering with nothing.

In fact, search engines are more like a TV camera crew let loose in the
middle of a crowd of rowdy fans after a game. Seeing the camera, everyone
acts boorishly and jostles to get in front. The act of observing something
changes it."

That's Heisenbergy.

BB
--

http://homepage.ntlworld.com/bill.kr...tapestries.htm
http://www.crystal-liaison.com/artis-orbis/index.html
kruse (AT) crystal-liaison (DOT) com Gifty! Shiny! BB!

__/ [ Windsun ] on Wednesday 01 March 2006 19:24 \__

---------------------------------------------------------------------
"Roy Schestowitz" <newsgroups (AT) schestowitz (DOT) com> wrote in message
news:du4men$ahd$1 (AT) godfrey (DOT) mcc.ac.uk...
'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...ml?mod=blog s

Nothing new really, it has been happening for the past year or so. It just
now got bad enough for the WSJ to notice it I guess. Getting so half the
results you get on searches are worthless "phony content" and/or scraper
sites, or sites full of SE spam that are only for selling Google Adspace.

The author of the article is referring less to the 'death of journalism'
aspect (blogs and content saturation) and more to search engine positions
hi-jacking owing to organic content, which is not original. Actually, he's
probably alluding to both. The terrain is changing, so the Internet bound to
blow up if not adapt to the change.

__/ [ canadafred ] on Wednesday 01 March 2006 19:50 \__

"Roy Schestowitz" <newsgroups (AT) schestowitz (DOT) com> wrote in message
news:du4men$ahd$1 (AT) godfrey (DOT) mcc.ac.uk...
'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...ml?mod=blog s

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/archiv...pam-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.

What most people don't see or get (except for me) is the real truth
which is 90% of the worthless content is all coming from one single big
company. It isn't a lot of small people spamming their url's and doing
link farms that's doing it as it seems from the surface. It is one big
company that is respondsible for 90% of the spam and worthless content
at search engines esp google. Here's just a few links to sites they own
and they own thousands of domains and thousands of free hosted sites all
with thousands of internal pages:

www.geeklog.net/
www.pornmoviesvault.com
www.porngalleryvault.com
www.bangbangbabes.com
www.only4porn.com/
best-catalog-for-you.info
http://www.kopete.org/
www.adultfriendfinder.com

__/ [ Sam ] on Thursday 02 March 2006 22:15 \__

What most people don't see or get (except for me) is the real truth
which is 90% of the worthless content is all coming from one single big
company. It isn't a lot of small people spamming their url's and doing
link farms that's doing it as it seems from the surface. It is one big
company that is respondsible for 90% of the spam and worthless content
at search engines esp google. Here's just a few links to sites they own
and they own thousands of domains and thousands of free hosted sites all
with thousands of internal pages:

snip url's

Are you trying to give them a boost? *smile*