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The Quest for Quality Content (Just Got Tougher)

August 24, 2005

I do a lot of Technorati searches; I'm always impressed by the speed at which it crawls and indexes blog content.

For some searches on big brands, I'd seen some interesting similarities crop up: search results showing pages that were not duplicated, exactly, but so similar as to pique my interest. I traced them all back to one spot, the Blogger profile of Dan Hollings, which appears to be the hub of one of the most ... well, prolific content generation systems available.

I found Dan again later, this time leaving an article-length comment at Matt Cutts' blog. In it, Dan discusses his 100 Blogger blogs, "each with a core topical theme, but yet, each is targeted and personalized to a target audience."

Dan has created a blogging content creation system called Blog-Zilla. Far from the bottom-feeding tactics of content scraping and copyright violation, Blog-Zilla enables you to, among other things,

Never steal content, instead generate your own and let Blog-zilla hatch unlimited variations all with your blog's target audience in mind. (maybe you should read that again!)

He's right. Maybe you should read that again. "Unlimited variations." Here's an example of those variations. First, a paragraph from this post at the "Internet Marketing Tips for Lexxus" blog:

I recently checked the "gender stats" available from the Direct Sales Association, 79.9% of people in "direct sales" are female. Do the math and the boys total a paltry 20.1%. Many of the women in our industry (and customers we seek) are current or future moms. It seems natural that a new term has come on the scene: Mompreneurism.

Now here, fresh from Blog-Zilla's fiery belly, is the corresponding paragraph from this post at the "Internet Marketing Tips for Multi-level Marketing" blog:

Based on statistics available from the Direct Sales Association, 79.9% of people in "direct sales" are female. Guess what that means? Yes, the guys total a paltry 20.1%. Many of the women in our industry (and customers we seek) are current or future moms. Just when we thought the dictionary had all the words we needed a new term has come on the scene: Mompreneurism.

Make these subtle variations - 100 or more times - and ping a hundred blog engines, and imagine the results.

In his comment to the Cutts blog, Dan admits that

... because each lesson or tip I post has common elements, there is some overlap. My test indicate posts are between 25% to 75% different from blog to blog to blog and all content is author originated.

I did not major in math, but I know that "25% to 75% different," coindicentally, also means "25% to 75% identical."

Dan also asks Matt to "make note I’m not specifically blogging for search engine rankings," shortly after dropping four links into his comment post.

As far as editorializing, I don't know where to begin - so maybe I shouldn't. This isn't about "outing" Dan; with an 800-word comment to a Matt Cutts blog, he's pretty good at outing himself. I just believe that despite Blog-Zilla's claims of wanting foremost to help people reach niche audiences, this is the type of content creation that engines are working night and day to avoid.

All posts by Erik Dafforn
posted by Erik Dafforn at August 24, 2005 8:30 AM
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