One of the great SEO myths being propagated these days is the need for ever increasing amounts of CONTENT. Lawyers are told no amount of content is ever enough and that you need to continue to add content frequently to stay relevant in the search results. This type of thinking leads to the creation of useless pages like “Garage Door Accidents” and ridiculous BLOG ghost writing programs, that are often just rehashing of AP articles on current events. Far from enhancing the user experience this kind of high bounce rate content hurts the user experience and clutters the Internet.
Panda 4.0 takes issue with poor quality content. Just look at this BLOG http://kansascitycaraccidentlawyer.net/blog/. This is a simple rehashing of accident reports. There is no point of view and no value for a user. Who would ever bookmark this BLOG and come back to it? It was there only to manipulate Google – to fool Google into thinking this site was churning out fresh, relevant content. While not identical, the spun content on the site is virtually the same as hundreds of other sites. Panda 4.0 proved that spun content like this will not be tolerated anymore.
BLOGs like this has become the new ‘easy button’ for many SEO companies. Just like adding thousands of links used to be, adding spun content or BLOG posts like this is very cheap. I see lawyers and companies routinely outsource BLOG posts for less than 15 dollars a post. Besides making a lot of money on these programs, adding cheap BLOGs is useful for SEO companies in that helps to artificially inflate the amount of traffic to your site – helpful when your sites aren’t ranking. Finally, adding BLOG posts is a measurable, task driven endeavor that helps to justify their value.
In the old days SEO companies could justify their worth by showing the client how many links they were adding every month. While this may have helped in the old days with SEO, when Penguin rolled around, it didnt help that your link profile showed a systematic pattern of adding links overtime. A poorly written ghost written BLOG program, in which a writer adds the same type of 300-400 word post 4x a week, carries the same risk in my opinion.
Even today I run into prospects who after talking with other SEO companies, ask me how many links we are adding, how many social media posts, how many BLOG posts…etc… This paradigm needs to change.