Other software came along and inserted random text at the top and bottom of each article, so that each page became unique in its own way. Still more software was produced which substituted common words in existing PLR articles from stock synonyms (there was word going round that if a page was 28 percent more different than another page then you were okay). The problem was that if the page was read as a whole, it made no sense at all. But this could still fool the search engines. Just.

The search engines were reported to have recruited thousands of student "editors" to manually weed out such aberrations from their indices. More emphasis was placed on non-reciprocal inbound links with the appropriate keywords in the anchor text (or within ten words left or right of the anchor text), and other "off-page" considerations. And so it went on. And on.

There were all sorts of "solutions" offered to those webmasters who had known the heady days of the big-figure Google checks for doing very little, and were willing to pay almost any price to return to them. Accordingly, the software became more ambitious. In turn, the search engines became more demanding, and there were increasing signs that perfectly legitimate sites were being punished as well as the spam pages.

We seem to have reached a point where something has to give. The browsing public does deserve better than scraped content, RSS feeds and the abundance of proto-plagiarism that it still gets. The need is for content that makes sense and is readable by real people and also of value, as well as ticking all the boxes of the search engine bots' latest algorithm. Equally, webmasters have a need for such content as well, yet they also have an understandable need to be able to produce that content on demand to their increasingly information-hungry readers. To satisfy such demands it is unlikely that one piece of software alone will suffice. Instead, it seems clear that a system of content delivery needs to exist which is actually sophisticated enough to produce content which is of value to all concerned.