Word Farms: Editorial Junk Food
There is a place for User Generated Content (USG). Epinions is a great example and Amazon is another. The echo of “write what you know” rings true on both of these sites and provides useful content assisting buyers on their way to the checkout basket. Then there are the content farms, more concerned with rising to the top of an SEO search than promoting your brand. A quick search for “content writer” in Google resulted in 293,000 results. The top return was a company asking you this:
“Have you ever wondered as [sic] what is the importance of writing articles to your websites? You must have come across many article sites specially designed to post the articles you have written. Why are such websites designed and what is their importance? Just go through this article and you would be in a better position to answer all the above questions.”
Not the sort of corporate editorial you want promote your brand, especially if it can land your company at the top of search engine results. Dig around the Internet and you will find companies paying “writers” $5-7 dollars for 500-word articles. We don’t know any professional writers who would work for this kind of pay.
Click here for a story published today by the Guardian covering low-quality articles produced by word farms. In addition, remember that SEO is an important part of your business and content management should consider SEO, but not at the expense of your brand and message.