Some web publishers just have no taste when it comes to getting their ads in front of targeted searchers. What defines “content rich” pages for them is totally different from what most think of as valuable content.

There is a current frenzy to churn out more and more pages with garbage content with mainly the purpose of trapping the unsuspecting searcher to click on ad links. Lists of 300 to 1,000 keyword related phrases are spun into as many individual pages for each phrase. Yes, for example, if the keyword of choice is “make money”, they will have a list of every conceivable combination pertaining to it such as:

make money
make money online
make money at home
make money on the internet
make money fast
make money from home
ways to make money
make extra money
make money on ebay
make money fast online….

They don’t publish one search engine friendly web page for “make money”, but they make one page for each permutation of the keyword. They provide “rich content”, either from public domain articles grabbed from directories, or from “scrapings” of keyword related nonsense from the web. There are now many software programs that will churn out these pages in a few seconds per keyword phrase. Some of these are ArticleSiteBuilder, TrafficHurricane, TrafficPanther and Articlebot + XsitePro. Some of the systems make ugly, plain pages while others help users to make truly lovely pages that serve only to suck the reader into clicking on the ad links there. Pretty pages can only be geared to suck in the unsuspecting as the search engine bots cannot see “pretty”,

Some of the companies selling the software to make these pages list search engine optimization of the targeted web site as a potential benefit for making these keyword sites. Where are the independent reports to support that claim?

The resulting pages make perfect sense to a search engine, but to the person searching the web for information these pages contain pure keyword-laced gibberish. The very worst of these would make none of the links clickable except the ones leading where the publisher wants to send the reader.

The unsuspecting customer has a choice to use the back button, select from the many advertising links on the page, or move forward into the web of gibberish – get lost in it to ultimately either use an ad link or close the browser window.

If the ad link is chosen, the publisher wins!

This doesn’t cheat the advertiser. The person clicking the ad is truly targeted to the keyword used; so it’s not really fraud. So, what’s the matter with this? As a search engine user, I don’t like to feel tricked. I remember when search engines contained information and I didn’t have to wade through gibberish to find it. Time is worth money and if I have to wade through ad-chummed search engine results when I need important information fast, I do feel cheated.

My response is to refuse to click on any ad link found on such pages. Why should I reward these publishers for what I feel degrades the value of the search engine? The spiders ranking our web pages need to become smarter to keep these ad-chummed garbage pages from ever being indexed – no matter how well optimized they are for the search engines. From what I have read, they day is coming when this will happen.

If you are making a website, watch out for duplicate content. Search engines will notice and you will have your rank decreased, or you may even be sandboxed for it.