WSJ Writes on Useless “Original Content”

Posted by JohnCarcutt
March 1, 2006

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I don’t plan on using other peoples work as a basis for my articles often, but Lee Gomes at the Wall Street Journal has written such an excellent piece on one of the newest issues facing SEOs that I had to share.

His Article: Our Columnist Creates Web ‘Original Content’ But Is in for a Surprise

Mr. Gomes writes about a new but growing problem in this industry, the legitimacy of “Original Content”. More and more website owners are realizing what we SEOs have know for some time, content is the one true measure of a websites indexability. Webmasters in groves are jumping on the content bandwagon, however many are too lazy or do not have the skills or funds to produce real original content. This is leading to the disturbing trend of modifying other peoples content to make it appear “original”.

Mr. Gomes enlightens us with his accounts of an attempt to do some freelance copywriting in his article.

My job, it became clear, was to make enough small changes to the text for Whirlywinds to be able to pass it off to search engines as his own. Which is, in fact, what most of the “original content” on these sites turns out to be: cut-and-paste jobs with superficial modifications.

This is one more problem we as SEOs will need to be on the look out for and Lee Gomes did an excellent job of bringing it to the attention of the WSJ readers.