the tail-eating snake of the web
There’s been a metric ton of bits spilled on content farms lately; Paul Kedrosky blogs about the “drive-by damage” this type of content has done as he tries to research a new washing machine.
Google has become a snake that too readily consumes its own keyword tail. Identify some words that show up in profitable searches – from appliances, to mesothelioma suits, to kayak lessons – churn out content cheaply and regularly, and you’re done. On the web, no-one knows you’re a content-grinder.
The result, however, is awful. Pages and pages of Google results that are just, for practical purposes, advertisements in the loose guise of articles, original or re-purposed. It hearkens back to the dark days of 1999, before Google arrived, when search had become largely useless, with results completely overwhelmed by spam and info-clutter.