Production-line blogging

Posted by Stewart Twynham on 8 March 2009

Faced with an ever-dwindling marketing budget, many companies are looking at alternative ways to promote their brand. Production line blogging – where tens, hundreds or even thousands of promotional articles are rolled out by teams of unseen writers across the globe – just so happens to be one of those alternatives that’s best avoided.

Automation can be a God-send – take the other night.  At 3:26am – I received an automated emergency telephone call from a flood alerting service to warn me of an imminent flood in my local area of Gloucester, England. Important information, presented in a timely manner, allowing myself and my family to be evacuated to safety, except that:

• I don’t live in Gloucester; in fact I don’t even live in England.
• I have never lived in or around the Gloucester area.
• after checking the BBC website, I can see no mention of an active flood alert in the Gloucester area in any case!

And therein lies the trouble with any form of production-line automation: machines – and ultimately people – can sometimes get it all wrong.
The same is true for automated or production-line blogging. These blog writers don’t know you, they’ve never met you, they’ve never heard about your company or your products or services until the e-mailed assignment arrives in their inbox – and they care little for your company except for the small cheque you’ll be sending at the end of the month for writing thousands of words of drivel. How do you think that might help to elevate your brand?

Expensive drivel

Leafing through one of our client’s search engine results, I found several rather dubious articles which looked a lot like press releases posted onto unknown blog or news sites. Questioning the client about these revealed that they had used a blogging service for about a year, but didn’t renew because they couldn’t see any measurable benefit.

Interestingly, no-one within the company had actually vetted or even seen the information that had been written about the company, however they had been paying almost £1,000 a month for the service – so probably felt that they didn’t have to. The trouble was, the thick end of £12,000 a year had bought them little more than some expensive drivel.

I’ll share with you just some of the highlights.

• “Company Name is a world leader in X.” (Company name spelt incorrectly, brand X spelt incorrectly)
• “The great thing about X is...” (goes on to list several benefits that brand X does NOT actually deliver)
• Incredible phrases like: “The methodicalness module also hit to effectively control noesis and competencies throughout the organization”.  You really couldn’t make it up!

My all-time favourite is this particular article – only the company and product names have been changed to protect the innocent. I share these two excerpts with you in order to save others from a similar fate.

The <company> flat of consultancy services provides firms with a more economical artefact of minimizing ascension overheads. <company> crapper support an methodicalness to adapt, develop and structure its fashion of activeness in artefact that promotes manlike inventiveness improvement and enhances coverall playing performance.

Two much longer paragraphs of drivel then follow, with this nugget being used to wrap things up quite succinctly I feel:

Furthermore, whatever of the another key services which <company> provides in this affectionateness allow ability profiling, impact optimization, action measurement, modify direction and relation selection. The <service>® help is a pliant assist that crapper be practical holistically or in segments. The benefits which computer companies crapper obtain from adopting the <service> help is genuinely diverse.

Why bother?

All of these examples stem from a business looking to take short-cuts to search engine success. These quite horrific articles exist solely to provide food for the likes of Google with absolutely zero intellectual input, validation or control. That’s why we refer to them as search engine fodder.

The trouble is, they create a dreadful impression of your business and of your brand. In our client’s case, a casual search for brand X in Google presents over 50,000 similar articles – with the very first page dominated by everything other than our client’s own home page (despite being absolutely assured by the SEO company that they had hired that this would never ever happen). Any human stumbling upon such a page will be left confused and rightly concerned.

Just ineffective – or downright dangerous?

These types of articles are becoming increasingly ineffective as Google tightens up its rules and makes its software more sophisticated with every release. In other words – these techniques no longer work!

Unfortunately, things have begun to take a more sinister twist. Many sites today use some form of automated syndication to bloat their own content. This means that copies of copies of copies of these ineffective articles are now swishing about the Internet with no-one at the helm.

For very complicated reasons which are beyond the scope of this blog, instead of promoting their clients to the top of the Web, two years later these articles are now beginning to bubble up on results pages alongside and even ahead of the very sites that they were supposed to promote. It may have been fairly painless (if expensive) for a company to get a couple of hundred nonsense articles written for them, but with Google now reporting over 50,000 instances of our client’s unique brand name – I would strongly suggest that this particular damage might never be undone.

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