SEO Blogs are Worse Than Affiliate Data Feed Sites
Random Pictures Can Make Duplicate Content Look Authoritative (Philip Wilson Steer: The Black Hat)
In the affiliate days of old, you could take a data feed full of product descriptions and slap it up on the net, buy yourself a PR9 link and you were off to the races. Champagne for everyone. It was long tail before the phrase existed. Google got wise, and in addition to de-linearizing PR, they started doing very sophisticated duplicate content filtering.
The cliche term “Add Value” was born sometime thereafter, and augmenting commodity content has become an art form. The key is to add enough new and unique value so that you can have oodles of keyword rich content without tripping the duplicate filters. I’ve said ‘add value’ again and again at conferences, and I really mean it. I really mean add value to my wallet, that is, but if that means making an original site then so be it.
Now, I just started blogging a couple months ago. (I made one post on Netflix several years ago, but abandoned it like so many blogs). I’m really not qualified to speak on blogging, but I do — and I’m not alone. But as I blog, and read more blogs, I can’t help but make the conclusion about SEO Blogs: They take some commodity piece of information, rewrite it, paraphrase, reorder it, and call it their own. It’s crap.
Chop it up, slice it, add a picture you probably don’t have rights to, and presto you have yourself an Affiliate Data Feed Site SEO Blog. Now I didn’t count the steps, but it could be 10, 20, 48, 5, 7 who cares. It’s the same old shit.
Now go think of something new to say.
5 Comments
December 5th, 2008 at 3:45 am
That is somewhat of a generalization, wouldn’t you say ?
December 5th, 2008 at 5:01 am
[...] John Coronella of OnlineMarketer has posted to the effect that SEO Blogs are rearranged piffle. [...]
December 5th, 2008 at 7:08 am
could not agree more.
December 5th, 2008 at 9:14 am
So true, and it’s spreading to other areas of Internet Marketing, like content management to social media and ppc. It’s all become the same stuff over and over again.
December 30th, 2008 at 3:11 pm
There seems to be an echo effect online – how often do you see the same celeb headline repeated 1,000 times on Google results? If you trust Google’s algorithms to find value and original content, then you have to start writing truly unique content instead of playing the echo chamber game.