Nice to see you here!

They get away with it by plaguing you night and day on the phone. I work 12 hours a day at my PC, and after a while I just gave in to the pressure from him (and the client) to get rid of him.

There is a lot of pressure to get articles written for you nowadays as micro businesses have to complete with larger ones online. Outsourcing is the name of the game.

But I’ve found outsourcing abroad (be it India, Romania or anywhere else), to be time-consuming, and something I have had to micro-manage. Well at least when what I have needed is complicated like say a website or detailed articles. However, things like outsourced logos and artwork have been a success, and I’ve worked with designers in the US and Romania on those. I think it only works well when the thing you want is easily defined and compact. Well, that’s my experience anyway.

which features another article written by Mosaic Services. That was supposed to be about buying UK property, and talked about the tidal waves and tropical vegetables.

Yes – buying this stuff is pointless, but it is incredibly hard work to produce articles cheaply to make your web site or blog content rich enough to count.

When a small business finally works out that their web sites don’t bring in new visitors, they take the worrying step from only wanting web design done cheaply, to wanting SEO done cheaply as well. And so an industry of useless article creation is born.

Indian companies can currently operate at lower cost, so they seem ideal for jobs like article writing and SEO. But I think people need to use local talent with language skills and knowledge co-incident with their own. Or you end up with laughable attempts at making contextual sense, like the one above.

And no – it is defintely NOT useful from a search engine point of view. Google and others don’t want their indexes overflowing with absurd content. Because if they allowed it to happen people would say “hmmm every time I search for something in search engine X , it delivers spammy rubbish back, I think I’ll move onto search engine Y”. So they use other criteria to measure relevance and worth so as not to be wholly dependent on keyword density.

And that is true even if stupid articles like the one I have highlighted above, are only used as cloaking fodder for search engines. If the site responsible had something better to say they wouldn’t employ these inane articles at all. God can only guess what the poor user sees if articles like these are just for the search engine.

Buying low quality third party content seems pointless from a human readership standpoint. However maybe it is useful from a search engine standpoint as the search engines only look at the keywords and cannot know that the content is in fact useless? The search engines regard the content as meaningful and useful even though it is not? What do you think, Liz?