Dynamic Market Content

The Problem With Automated Content
By Gordon Goodfellow

Cast your mind back about three years.

Shortly after the dawning of the Google Adsense Age, webmasters learned that their sites were effectively little gold mines or "virtual real estate" as one expert put it. The more cyber-property you had, the more virtual billboards you were able to put up (also called Adsense blocks). And so if you made $n dollars by owning one web page with an Adsense ad (or any ad) on it, then it was reasonable to assume that you would make $n x 10,000 if you had 10,000 pages with similar ads on it.

Similarly, reason suggested that 1 million such pages would make you $n x 1,000,000.

Webmasters were eager to rise to this Gold Rush challenge, and so were those present-day providers of picks and shovels, the software developers. Applications were developed which could produce thousands of web pages in less than an hour from a keyword list. All you had to do was a little research using Overture's keyword tool or its many free derivatives - the more sophisticated practitioner of this art would have added Wordtracker into the mix - and you had your keyword list.

Add some adjectival superlatives such as "better" or "best" or "latest" before each keyword and you had an even bigger list. Then after each keyword add "in New York" or "in London" or even all the place names in the English speaking world (there are over 30,000 of them) and you had a massive list. The software which was available at the time could, and still can, produce whole websites consisting of tens of thousands of pages from your own such bloated keyword handiwork. Each page of that site would be highly optimized for one keyword phrase, so that you could more or less guarantee that your page would be in number one position on all the search engines, simply because it was so specific. Such websites could be cranked out and uploaded to your server all in the same day. You could produce 50 such websites, each with thousands of pages, in a single month; all of them with Adsense blocks on each page.

The problem was, they were all unreadable.