I’m on my soapbox tonight, so if you aren’t in the mood for a rant stop reading now.

If you’ve been following us for a while, you’ll notice that we are really distancing ourselves from the term “SEO.”  Yes, much of what we do helps websites get more visibility and better rankings, but I’m so tired of the way that most of the hacks are ruining SEO that I don’t want to play there any more.

Low-quality, automated, computer-written or “spun” articles, or articles written here by somebody that doesn’t have a clue about their topic, then translated to another language automatically and translated back to avoid any “duplicate content issues”  drive me crazy.

I usually see this kind of content when we are called in to fix something after somebody we are talking to fires their provider.  (Kind of interesting that almost every time we follow somebody else that didn’t deliver results, we see this kind of junk…hmmm, I wonder if there is any cause-and-effect relationship.)

Here’s one that I saw tonight that I just had to take a screenshot of.  Ignore the different-colored font, as that is just for advertising purposes for the website where the article was published.  If you are truly a glutton, read the whole thing to see how bad it is.  Otherwise, just read the three places I highlighted with the yellow marker.

Click on it for a larger version, the version below is a little fuzzy.

Click on the picture for a larger version

Is that the way that you want your company represented out there on the Web?

If a perfect and qualified prospect for a facelift and a mommy makeover read that article, would you be proud?  Would she click over to your website?  Would she call you?

Is the backlink from this page (with no rank or authority) really worth having?

Okay – now to the $20 part I mentioned above.

I want to coin a new term because I’m on a crusade to educate people about this junk.  I kind of like FUBAR (F*cked Up Beyond All Recognition) SEO, but that’s probably too cute.

Maybe just “Crap SEO”?

I’m not very creative – give me a few thoughts and I’ll send the best one a $20 Starbucks gift card, or I’ll be happy to donate a half hour of our time if you’d prefer.

Scott

Update #1: Clearly this company/website has a major “marketing campaign” in the works, as the article below was just posted the following day.  What a wonderful headline, and great copy to really sell web searchers on their service and how good they are!

I especially like that they are going to promote their client’s sites to the Bling Search Engine.  Wow, they must be special, I’d never heard of Bling – I thought that Bing was more popular.  Oh well.

Click on the picture for a larger version…

Click on the image for a more-readable version.

Update #2: I couldn’t ask for better examples of the FUBAR SEO that I hate so much!

The very next day, this article was posted on a site mostly in the Czech language.  It is 99.9% certain that this is what is called a “spun” article.  A software program reads the article and uses synonyms to make it appear unique, when in fact it is just non-sensical crap.

Look at the spun headline below – if the one above wasn’t bad enough, this one sure is.  Same thing with the opening sentences in the one below – unreadable.

I’m sure this will continue many days into the future, filling the Internet with garbage, but I’ll try to restrain myself and not keep updating this post…

Click on the picture for a larger version…

Click on this picture for a larger version…