Spam is in the eye of the beholder

by Sapphire (February 26, 2008)

I’ve got some sites that contain nothing but reprint articles. I used to fill them up with those free articles where you have to link back to someone’s size, but recently I’ve started replacing all those with PLR articles. They aren’t unique, but they’re better articles (mostly - you still have to watch them). It’s still basically an MFA type site (I don’t use AdSense on them, but they are definitely made to generate aff sales and PPC). I’ve only done this on one site so far.

Since the change, that site’s gotten StumbledUpon to the tune of about 400 new visitors in 4 days. I’m getting emails and comments posted about it in forums referring to the site as a great resource.

This got me thinking: to an SEO, this site is high-quality spam. To a visitor who finds it from the SERPs, I’m guessing they’ll feel the same since… well, you know what it’s like when you run into the same exact article from the first 9 results on page 1. But for people finding it in ways other than the SERPs, it’s a helpful site that contains all the info they’re looking for in one handy, fast-loading, well-organized site. For those people, it’s a find.

I want to be clear: I’m not arguing that this type of site if a great bet, longterm. I still think original content is the way to go, if for nothing other than SE purposes. But that really is the only advantage to original content. Visitors don’t care if it’s original as long as it gives them the info they were after. That’s something to consider when you’re building for visitors, and not search engines. Spam really is different things to different people. (Take LifeHacker - great resource to many of us, but I’m sure some people look at it and think “All they do is link out to other people - I’d rather put the blogs they link to on my feedreader.”)

My main concern with the PLR sites is conversion. Are people more or less likely to buy or click ads from a site that has PRL content versus original? Do they detect that the posters have different voices, and notice they’re all credited to the same writer? (Whereas on a group blog, the different authors have clear bylines.) Do people pick up on that stuff, and if so, does it lower their trust in high-quality PLR sites and cause them to avoid ads? Personally I think that’s pretty far-fetched, but I’d like to hear what some of you think about original content versus high-quality dupe content from a visitor’s perspective.

Posted in SEO
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