Automatic Content Generation

Search engine marketing may have its biggest application on the ‘World’ wide web but for many businesses, the local market is the major focus. Aside from targeting geographic locations and keywords as part of the overall SEO strategy or focusing PPC ad campaigns by geotargeting data, all kinds of businesses – from retail shops to service providers – who rely upon the local market are able to make use of Google’s ability to deliver relevant results to users based on more than just the keywords in their query.

Last Autumn, Google expanded its Maps service – an important part of localised search engine marketing – with the Place Pages feature. By aggregating information about businesses listed on Google, automatic content generation algorithms create pages contained a variety of data from across the web. As well as reviews and images, once a business claimed their “place page” they were able to add extra information to entice customers to their location and their services.

The Service Areas feature allows businesses to show what geographic areas they cover on Google maps; this is particularly useful for those without a storefront as it allows their service to be listed on maps without their address being made public. A new form of paid marketing is also on offer: “Advertising with tags”. For a monthly fee, businesses in certain areas can use tags to highlight their listings on Google.com and Google Maps with tags like “coupons” or other features relevant to the business. They don’t have any effect on SEO but they could feasibly help with driving conversion.

Full Story: Google Places introduces new tools for localised search engine marketing - Vertical Leap News (press release)

Because of this, splogs have been working on finding ways to feign legitimacy. This helps them both stay online longer as hosts are more reluctant to take them down, helps them better establish a rapport with the search engines, their end goal in most cases, and appeal more to human visitors.

They’ve used many tactics to meet this goal including truncating content use to comply with fair use, spinning content so that it is unrecognizable and even skipping on borrowing content at all and simply using automatic content generation .

However, several readers have drawn my attention to a new kind of spam site, one that, according to their site, gets its readers to submit RSS feeds for inclusion and instead tries to hide behind a veil of user-generated content. This idea of crowd-sourcing spam is a relatively new one to me, one that actually closely mirrors YouTube’s “wild west” early days, but is almost certainly going to upset many bloggers who have had their content used without permission.

Full Story: CrowdSourcing Spam Blogging? - Watching the Watchers.org (blog)