The evils of SEO

When I launched this blog, my purpose was to free myself from the pernicious habit of not writing unless I was being paid by the hour. It worked. Lately, whenever I have a block of unfilled time, I turn to the blog. It seems I always have something to say, although I'll admit my subject matter has no particular focus.

This seems to have fallen out of favor in the bloggers' world. Most of the blogs I happen upon have a specific subject, and sometimes the content is little more than a link to someone else's content. That's the "community" aspect of blogging, and it's extraordinarily valuable, but - unfortunately - it doesn't encourage creativity.

The fact that one can monetize a blog simply by putting Google ads on it and finding tricks to increase hits has spawned an entire industry of plagiarism. I'm aware of this because the source of many of my copywriting gigs is an online service that matches freelancers with companies needing professional services of various sorts. On any given day, you'll find a least a few posts that read like this:"I need you to paraphrase a competitor's website. There are a few pages that I don't want copied, since my company doesn't offer the same things."

or this

"We are looking for a part time or full time web content
writer paid on a per week basis. The content that you will be writing is articles for submission, blog entries, and basic content.
- 10 articles a week for a period of X weeks.
- no technical writing, a small amount of research may
be required when writing around a specific keyword
- article length - between 400 and 600 words per article
- the content is written based on keywords that we will
provide
- All content MUST be written by the winner of this bid
and must be unique, ie not directly copied from the
internet. Pay is $40 USD per week for 10 articles or $40 for a 1 week period."

Does anyone really believe that a competent copywriter will want to write ten articles a week, on subjects with which s/he has no familiarity, and get paid $4 for each of them? There's only one way to do that, and it's to lift someone else's copy from another site, change a few words, alter the sentence structure, and consider the job done.

It's clear that what's going on here is that "get rich quick" types (many of them not in the US) are putting up Web sites and blogs for the specific purpose of placing advertising on them. The content is secondary.

This reminds me of the 90s, just before the dot.com crash, when people believed that you could run a profitable Web site by selling ads from other sites, which in turn derived their own income from advertising. It was a house of cards, and destined to collapse.

This current plague of blogs existing solely for the purpose of providing a platform for SEO optimized text that will get enough hits to bring in advertising income seems unpleasantly familiar to me, and I won't participate in it. If people find my blog, they're not going to be attracted to it because it pops up on a Google search.

But I'm still considering monetizing this blog, just to see what happens. Watch the left column to see if I've made the leap.