Spam Content Sites are like Lettuce
If questionable or so called spam-sites actually do provide some value to someone, are they therefore valuable? If you have a lot of sites which each provide a tiny bit of value to someone, do you have a lot of value? I argue that you do not.
I had an interesting discussing with a friend about SEO and the value delivered by questionable websites, sparked by my previous post on SEO and Geosign. He pointed me to a rather timely article by the Record talking about the rebirth of Geosign as Moxy Media, and how Geosign (now as Moxy Media) is experiencing great success, making tons of money, and growing, now up to ~170 employees according to the article. I spent a few minutes and investigated some of Moxy Media's media (sites), and I've concluded they are spam. It wasn't an easy call though. Their sites are attractive, seem to be well designed, appear to have original content that looks like it was legitimately written by a human. But the question ultimately is do these sites have any real value? Did I learn anything reading them? Did it spark a single new idea in my head? Would I recommend the site to a friend?
Image by photofarmer via Flickr
Case Study 1: I read a lot of content on a couple of these sites, and it passed all my initial tests. But the more I read the more I realized there was something wrong. Yes, I was reading content, yes it appeared to make sense, but it was like eating lettuce. You can eat lettuce forever and not get full or satisfied. Check it out for your self, the site I looked at is called gizmocafe. I read some pages about '13" - 20" TVs', then the pages about '21" - 29" TVs'... Guess what, I next read about '"30" - 39" TVs'. And what did I learn, I don't really remember.
Case Study 2: I looked at another site of theirs, this time about local chiropractors. I clicked on car accidents, and read a bit about injuries that can occur from car accidents. Below that I saw a list of regional resources, oh, exciting, lets pretend I live in California and see what I can learn about local chiropractors in California. If you click on California, you then see three links to news articles, and a list of Californian cities. So, for the entire state of California, the only content they have is a list of cities in the state, and 3 news articles. I'm still hungry. You can argue these sites have some (small amount) of value to some one, and I'd have a hard time disagreeing. But, its worse than that. What about the cost of these sites? What about the real sites contributing real value that are not being found because of these sites? What of the time people are wasting arriving at these sites, having the sites pass their intuitive spam detectors, and then spending time reading and reading eventually to conclude as I did that there is nothing there. Yes these sites provide value, but their net value is negative because of the time they waste and the real value out there that they hide. Google will improve, and Moxy Media will once again be in trouble, or be forced to adapt. If you add up a lot of these sites, each providing their sliver of value, you don't get a lot of value, you get a lot of noise and pollution. I'd apply this same argument to domain parking sites, and to email spam. Maybe they provide value to someone.But at what cost?
