Pages that were manufactured at that speed could hardly rely on human dexterity in creating their content. So the software which produced them - and it was ingenious software - had to resort to other means. These largely fell into two groups: RSS feeds and what came to be called "scraped" content. The problem with RSS feeds was that lots of other people were using the same feed. The problem with scraped content was that it belonged to someone else. In both cases, the hyperlink which was obligatory (but which could be turned off in the case of the scraped content) bled Pagerank away and in other ways compromised the integrity of your site. Both practices also had the habit of leaving footprints for the search engines to spot. Lawyers' purses bulged a bit as well.

At about the same time, people searching the Internet complained of seeing bland web pages with content that was either non-existent, meaningless or repetitive (even, heaven forbid, duplicate). The search engines addressed this by punishing web sites that displayed those tendencies, and so raised the informational quality of their listings for a while. This punishment consisted of altering their algorithms so that sites or pages which demonstrated such blandness were either pushed so far down the listings that they effectively could not be seen, or delisted altogether (banned).

Along came a flurry of remedies. You could pay ghost-writers at Elance or Rentacoder to produce the content for you according to a specified keyword density (but even at $3 an hour it was expensive if you wanted to replace all those thousands of pages which had just been banned by Google). Then a huge mini industry of private label membership sites came along, charging you a monthly fee to use its thousands of stock articles without any copyright questions being asked. (But there were seldom the specific keyword phrases you wanted in those articles, and you could never control the keyword density; also you just knew that lots of other people were using the same articles from the same membership sites.)