04.13.08
Philip M. Parker Understands SEO in Reverse
Philip Parker is almost my idol. There are a lot of black hats that use computer generated content to make money. Most of them don’t use them to game Amazon.
The problem is as is often the case that they suck. You see most legit uses of computer generated content create tools which the user knows are generated. Google is computer generated content. Wikipedia is not. I think when you boil it down, this is the difference between computer and human generated content. Google points you in the right direction, and Wikipedia for all of its inaccuracies about hard topics is at least generally complete for the menial stuff.
Parker’s works which cover medical topics on the other hand strike me as border line dangerous. Some of my computer generated services return fun information, like singles who have expressed interest in the topics of a given webpage, which I bill as your readers might look like this…. Has little practical use, and no one is likely to be injured by their use. Parker’s books on the other hand are simply compilations of other reports and compendiums of non-copyrighted materials, but are also not fact checked.
Parker has 200k books, I know black hats with 200k websites each with 200k pages. Parker is just more willing to take individuals money, where as black hats prefer to take that of online advertisers. A quick Turing Engine, some starting keywords, and you have as many pages on what ever topic you want. Throw in a Thesaurus and you have the makings of a $100 a day website.
I find both practices distasteful, but atleast the blackhats are trying to fool the computer, not unwitting shoppers.
All of that said…. It does lend to the Public Data conversations of earlier this week.