Whether or not a business does well in the web economy is very often determined by how highly their company web sites rank for chosen targeted search phrases at search engines, so it is no small matter of importance to have a site full of highly ranked pages of quality content. Unique and original web content is usually rated higher by search engines for the sites it appears on - but only if that content is extensive, authoritative and interesting - as evidenced by traffic numbers, search engine clickstream data and popularity feedback from Google and Alexa toolbars. There are basically four sources of original web content - which vary widely in quality, desirability and value.
TOP OF THE WEB CONTENT FOOD CHAIN - PROFESSIONAL WRITERS
Professional writers of web content abound for those able to pay for truly original, unique and focused content. Well known web content writers such as Nick Usborne and Gerry McGovern produce polished and effective web content for internet based companies with substantial budgets. Nick Usborne is author of "Net Words - Creating High Impact Online Copy" is well regarded and has valuable insights to offer his clients. Gerry McGovern, author with Rob Norton of "Content Critical: Gaining Competitive Advantage through High-Quality Web Content" routinely speaks at conferences and teaches organizations about quality content.
Web copywriters make a decent living writing custom, focused and original web content, with emphasis on different aspects of copywriting for the web.
All are highly valued and relatively well compensated forms of writing.
Large, legitimate content creation companies have been launched, specifically to manage the creation of unique and original content for the web. One such company is InfoSearchMedia, which announced its launch in 2004 by sponsoring the Search Engine Strategies show in San Jose that year. They continue to sponsor search industry conferences to promote the value of unique content to attendees. I often recommend to clients that they consider adding dozens of topic focused pages to their sites in order to increase their ranking and have used InfoSearchMedia to provide that quality content for clients.
http://www.infosearchmedia.com
Content from InfoSearchMedia averages about $150 per page as part of a package of purchased written pieces of relatively short copy consisting of 250 to 300 words per page. In one experience recently a freelancer subcontracting to the company, was professional and pleasant to work with. The client was satisfied with the work after limited edits and minor rewrites of several pages. This is a commonly used option by high level companies, usually on the corporate level, with funding coming form marketing budgets.
FREE ALTERNATIVE TO EXPENSIVE CUSTOM WEB CONTENT
A surprisingly valuable, yet free source of quality content follows right on the heals of the expensive professional writers - smart, business savvy and knowledgeable experts operating their own web businesses who use a technique called "Article Marketing." These experts distribute their own thoughtful, well informed and worthwhile content to those willing to follow limited terms of service guidelines and respect copyright of the authors. Those savvy business owners distribute their articles through long established content distribution partners and some, in operation from as early as 1999, are web content pioneers.
The top sources of this free content are well known by web veterans as credible and respected providers of expertly penned articles. The grand daddy of all content providers is Ezine Articles run by Chris Knight, a well respected ezine content guru. EzineArticles has well over 100,000 quality articles submitted by over 20,000 authors in hundreds of topic categories.
http://www.ezinearticles.com/
Another longstanding and well known article site is GoArticles, a member of the Jayde online family of pioneering internet sites. Content delivery from both of these free content leaders is available via RSS feed or email notification by author or category choices. Dozens of smaller players exist in the free content niche, including topic specific archives focusing on niche industries.
http://www.goarticles.com/
While this type of web content won't serve to describe products, present as sales letters or or define an organization, it does provide excellent resource material on hundreds of topics that site visitors may be interested in - and serves to increase search engine ranking for both those web site owners who use them and the article authors, whose contributed work carries links back to their web sites.
WRITING SWEATSHOPS - CONTENT ABUSES EMERGE
A national news item from a March 1st Wall Street Journal article illustrates the high demand for "Original Content" for the web when WSJ "Portals" columnist, Lee Gomes discussed his experience writing "Original Content." He bids through a freelance writers site to write content at an estimated 15 cents an hour!
Gomes mentions in his article that he agreed to write fifty 500 word articles for $100 - for which he'd be required to crank out 25,000 words for that unheard of rate. He had agreed to such a ridiculous rate of pay in order to find out what the "Original Content" buzz is all about and presumably to gain access to someone seeking that undervalued written text in order to interview them for his Wall Street Journal article.
http://tinyurl.com/kdgda (Wall Street Journal)
After delivering his first article to his contact on the requested popular topic of "bird flu" he is asked to provide more on the subject and is given several articles to rewrite - which he discovers are taken verbatim from the World Health Organization, WebMD, and New Scientist web sites. Gomes didn't complete his writing assignment after being asked to rewrite copyrighted works. He told his client that he felt uncomfortable - being asked to do what was obviously unethical and illegal.
Unfortunately there are hungry English speaking writers from third world countries who don't, like Gomes, have a well paying day job at a well respected national newspaper. Those struggling authors appear to be willing to write and rewrite at 15 cents an hour - even if the work is copyrighted and being illegally lifted and repurposed. Those toiling in writing sweatshops have little incentive to search out the inevitable original uses of material provided to them. Few could be expected to prove copyright infringement and then discard the work (and income) they need badly.
But, as in all cases where something is highly valued, there will emerge abuses and distortions designed to take advantage of high demand. Content abuses descend even lower than greedy content resellers taking advantage of hungry writers willing to work for peanuts. Even though free web content is available from multiple well known free content sources, some consumers of web content are so insistent on using only "original content" that they will resort to any means to create unique content.
SOFTWARE STEALS CONTENT FOR HIGH RANKING GIBBERISH
"Frankenstein Pages" are an emerging "Original Content" abuse. Given that monstrous title by Barry Schwartz in a post to his SERoundtable blog where he points to a HighRankings Forum thread discussing this insidious new web content abuse.
http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/003465.html
That imaginative title is assigned to articles stitched together from pieces of multiple articles. The Frankenstein content thread is five pages long at Highrankings as of this writing, with SEO's, copywriters and article writers quite rightly upset about new software that pulls sentences from multiple online articles and reassembles them into a new so-called "Original Content" articles.
http://www.highrankings.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=20859
A "mashup software" author (one of many software products making this offensive practice possible) chimes in defending the value of his article theft and sentence stitching software. He claims (wrongly) that all uses of less than 400 words fall under the "Fair Use Doctrine" of copyright law. He has promoted his software via unsolicited emails to SEO's as a way that they might avoid paying for "original content". That software pulls content from free article sites, based on keyword phrases found in sentences in those articles, then randomly creates a new article using those keyword focused sentences.
Never mind that those articles are often nonsensical upon any attempt to read them, they are often posted only as fodder for Google Adsense or YPN (Yahoo Publisher Network) contextual ads on sites that have no other purpose than to provide blocks of keyword focused text in which to place those ads - hoping to attract visitors who then click away via the Adsense or YPN ads, thus making the site owner hosting those "Frankenstein Pages" advertising income.
The software may also be used to add pages to a site simply to increase the number of pages on a particular topic so that site is seen as a resource with lots of valuable content on a particular topic. While that may work for search engine spiders, it would never work for human readers who spend the time to read those automated assemblages of stolen content. But many believe that the software may help increase ranking of a site in search engine algorithms in some instances.
CONTENT SPIDERS AND SCRAPERS AND BOTS, OH MY!
Copywriters and article marketers universally find use of that type of article "mashup software" offensive and argue that all "fair use" under U.S. Copyright law would require quoting and naming the author, and linking to their site as required in terms of use required by the vast majority of authors writing for free distribution. Imagine the number of links the resulting "mashup" articles would carry if that usage agreements were followed as required by authors. A standard four paragraph, 500 word article would end up with between five and ten citations of author sources and links to each.
http://www.copyright.gov/title17/92chap1.html#107
Further, those article distribution sites clearly post additional terms of use (like Publish101, GoArticles and EzineArticles) which prohibit "scraping" of those sites with automated software of any kind, and each employ methods of detection intended to stop "scraper bots" by denying them site access by automated means (IP address denial, access frequency "Captcha" image password forms). Each of those article sites also restrict numbers of articles which can be used by any one site and the types of uses to which the pieces can be put (no warez, offensive, hate, unsolicited commercial emails).
http://copyright.publish101.com
http://www.ezinearticles.com/terms-of-service.html
http://www.goarticles.com/publisher.html
But regardless of copyright laws, author usage restrictions or article site terms of use limitations, there continue even more abuses. A little digging uncovers worms selling article databases prepackaged with articles which were distributed to free article sites. These prepackaged article templated sites sell full databases of thousands of articles built-in to "ready to publish" sites pre-stocked with content openly scraped from article archives such as those mentioned above and many others. Those assembling those packages care not that both authors and article archive sites specifically forbid such commercial use.
PRIVATE LABEL RIGHTS TURN ILLITERATES INTO AUTHORS
At the bottom of the web content barrel are content crumbs floating in a slimy, drippy morass of words known as "PLR" articles. "Private label rights" are an attempt to make recycled hashes of bad writing and encourage content hungry site owners to purchase awful article collections and apply their own names and site links to the bubbling morass of steaming wretch. Several PLR sources then encourage further "customization" of those reheated web content leftovers for RESALE to others!
Some PLR sites simply encourage site members and users of that rewarmed slurp to distribute it to the free article sites with their own names on it, leading to identical articles submitted by dozens of named authors at article sites. This offensive practice has meant that legitimate article sites must then adopt both automated filtering methods for duplicate content and outright banning of some authors.
That "Original Content" is so highly valued by web sites means that illicit methods of content creation will proliferate, whether it is poorly paid writers cranking it out honestly, poorly paid writers unknowingly rewriting copyrighted works or "Mashup" software stealing sentences from authors without attribution and reassembling "Frankenstein pages" and "Private Label Rights" articles out of stolen content.
There are hundreds of reputable professional writers capable of creating custom web content for those willing and able to pay professional writing fees. There are many thousands of freely available articles written by knowledgeable and experienced writers which could be drawn from established article archives and used legitimately, with full author approval. The only requirement to those using those articles being that they agree to terms of use plainly stated by authors. But those who resort to "Frankenstein Pages" and "Private Label Rights" articles made up of stolen, plagiarized or "writing sweatshop" produced work are perverting legitimate web content - and clogging the search engines with sp*mmy pages of gibberish.
Legitimate authors and well established article archive sites are hoping for search engine filtering that drops results from obvious "Frankenstein Pages" and "Private Label Rights" articles made up of stolen, regurgitated and rehashed sentences. That's a tall order, even for the large stable of Google PhD's.
Mike Banks Valentine blogs on Web Content developments from http://weblogs.publish101.com He operates a free web content distribution site at: http://Publish101.com