Internet users might soon be fed up enough to demand action against search engine optimization (SEO) spam. But they probably won’t have to, because the search engines will take action for them.
Once before at TecTrends Monitor I looked at the SEO business, and a second look is prompted by a new piece on Demand Media by David Carr in the New York Times.
The story is again about astonishing output – five times more YouTube videos than any other source; a million articles floating around online. And the remarkable, semi-automated way it is produced, with search algorithms spitting out topics (mostly in the how-to genre) for ’sharecropper’ writers and videographers who then grind out content in bulk.
A number of firms have jumped into this business, and AOL may be about to join them. The problem is that much if not most of what is produced this way is junk, produced in haste by people who don’t know or care much about the subject, but know how to crank out boilerplate text filled with search terms.
A search fail described by the always useful Farhad Manjoo at Slate illustrates the problem. During a recent scandal the top search result for a celebrity plus mistress’s pictures rewarded salacious searchers not with the pictures, but merely an illiterate SEO spam ‘news’ article crammed with text repeating the celebrity’s name and ‘mistress’s pictures.’
This works, in a nutshell, because Google (and Bing) have not yet figured out how to identify this sort of junk and filter it out of search results. Just give them time, because SEO spam detracts from the quality of their product, namely good search results.
Search engine algorithms aren’t going to be literary critics in the foreseeable future. But linguists will probably be able to work out the pattern and density of keywords that marks spam or semi-spam, not substantive text, and adjust search results accordingly. Which will be the end of the SEO spam business.
The bottom line here is that usable work has to be created by and for humans, not with automated shortcuts. And while many labors of love can be had online for free, the rest you have to pay for, and pay enough to get coherent results, not SEO spam or other kinds of junk.