According to Matt Cutts of Google, Internet marketers should avoid the unethical practice of buying links by paying a few pennies to the folks who complete tasks via Amazon Mechanical Turk and scoring free links from their efforts. Let me rephrase that: Google says it’s wrong to pay for other people to link to your website, but it’s totally cool to score hundreds or thousands of links – not by paying a professional copywriter to create an awesome resource for you – but by spending about 20 bucks for a handful of people to perform cheap labor for you with Amazon Mechanical Turk. Don’t believe me? Watch this video.
In case you’re unfamiliar with Amazon Mechanical Turk, it’s a place where companies pay unwitting individuals a few cents to complete tasks that can’t be automated. Looking to work from home? As I write this blog post, you can earn a whole penny for taking 10 minutes to answer some questions about a news article. If you do six of these tasks in an hour, you’re making an hourly wage of 6 whole cents! I tried doing these tasks when I was unemployed last year, and even with my efficiency, I wasn’t even making minimum wage.
But according to Google, this is a perfectly acceptable way to outsource crowdsource your linkbait. Matt Cutts talks about someone who paid a total of $25 to get a whole bunch of people to compile a list of adjectives about top Twitter users. This is quality content. And not just any quality content, it’s pure linkbait gold. This is what Google wants to index. It’s completely within their guidelines for ethical SEO.
As a damn good copywriter, I take offense to this. This isn’t quality content. This is crap. This is pandering to the lowest common denominator for a quick chuckle, and paying slave wages to make it happen. Where is the quality in that? Tell me, Matt Cutts of Google’s Webspam team, why would you promote the proliferation of crap like this online instead of encouraging people to invest in something of value?
Dude, I was a Quality Rater. I know what your quality guidelines are – or at least what they were a year and a half ago. Have you really fallen so far? Do you really want to tell the world that what the Internet needs is another insipid fluff piece about Twitter? I’m sorry, sir, but you’ve just discredited everything you’ve ever said about quality content online.
And what is “white hat” about paying crap wages for something inane that could potentially make your business thousands of dollars? That may not break anything in your Webmaster guidelines, but it certainly doesn’t seem ethical to me. Just because you can get away with paying someone a nickel for 45 minutes of work doesn’t mean that you should. In fact, it would be against U.S. employment laws if there was an employee relationship involved. But that’s a whole different rant about the abuse of independent contractors.
All content is paid for in one form or another. I happen to make a living writing quality content because, during my stint as a Quality Rater, I actually wanted to try and make the Internet a better place. What’s the difference in paying writers (say, bloggers perhaps?) to review and link to your product than paying someone to produce content for you in order to attract links? On one hand, the money goes to the writer to manipulate people into linking, on the other hand, the money goes to the writer who was “manipulated” into publishing the link.
Oh wait, that’s right… bloggers should work for free and shouldn’t be paid for linking to companies in the first place. That’s essentially what it’s come down to when Google instituted this “no paid links” policy. The companies don’t suffer. They’re getting free freaking publicity by not paying bloggers to link to them. Yeah, I’m a blogger, too. It’s ridiculous how many moms I know are working for free so that they can have the “honor” of reviewing a $5 product and not get slammed for writing a paid review. It’s crap.
But Google doesn’t respect content creators. That much is clear. It just wasn’t obvious to me just how badly the search giant wanted to screw content producers until now. Google doesn’t really care about quality content. They just want everyone to jump through their hoops so they can keep making money hand over fist for other people’s hard work.
I can’t believe I’m late to THIS discussion *slaps self*. Man…do I have plenty to say (but I’ll keep it short). The web is overflowing with garbage: sweat-shop rehashed content, pushed by ubiquitous self-celebs….people who become famous by giving the appearance of being famous. Sheer visibility, coupled with overwhelming ego, delivered with suffocating pomposity.
Fresh perspective takes time, thought, research and editing. Paying someone pennies to produce content is a great deal like ordering fertilizer and receiving elephant crap. It’s just a big stinky pile of poo unless it’s properly composted.
If Google favors crap found by people who don’t have the brains and ability to get paid a living wage, that explains a great deal about the preponderance of utter cowflop dominating the web.
It is unfortunate that some businesses are unwilling to pay a decent wage for the single most important sales tool they can employ. Excellent writing is rare. And worth every penny.
I’m probably at least 30 years older than you and everyone who’s commented. I’m not internet savvy, don’t twitter, for that matter don’t own a television set. But I do know exploitation when I see it. After listening to a favorable review of mechanical turk on NPR’s Marketplace (the only caveat was “SOME jobs on MT may pay below minimum wage”) I went to the MT site and couldn’t believe what I saw. 1984 flashed before my eyes: As in George Orwell. As in creating a race of slaves.
Volunteer labor? Hardly. Economic necessity is a “gun to the head” of billions on the planet. What’s scariest to me is that aside from your article and maybe a few others I haven’t found yet there’s virtually no outcry against MT, no understanding of what it represents. Thank you for sounding the alarm.
I am a professional writer too. Let’s face it. People don’t value what we do because everyone can string some words together. We just do it better. The solution is to have our own blogs that earn ad revenue instead of letting others decide what they should pay us. A writer’s blog is going to be better than a non-writer’s blog every time. That’s how we can compete.
There’s a lot of strong feelings about Mechanical Turk here. I want to play devil’s advocate for a moment:
-Mechanical Turk isn’t limited to the US.
-If you live in a part of the world where (1) jobs are scarce, (2) the standard of living is low and (3) you can get internet access, Mechanical Turk is a boon. Because the jobs are so great? No. Because it’s work? Yes.
-Think back to earlier in the decade when offshoring became a volatile topic. For everyone American saying “They took our jobs!” there was someone in a developing country who’s standard of living has just gotten a boost.
If you have some compassion for the world outside of the US, now’s the time to remember about it. Mechanical Turk tasks generally aren’t a good supply of jobs for US workers where (1) the cost of living is really, really high and (2) our minimum wage is high enough to, on some level, accomadate that. (I have to qualify that, because I’m not any more interested in working for minimum wage than the rest of your are. And that’s largely because wouldn’t want to have to move from my small, crappy appartment to a small, crappy, cockrach-infested one.)
I wouldn’t expect a US worker to embrace working through Mechanical Turk jobs any sooner than the average American would embrace the idea of relocating to an underdeveloped country to find work. But don’t forget that work that seems unacceptable to a wealthy country may be much more desirable to others. And how will we create global equality? By forcing the wealthly to embrace a lower standard of living? (Just try to find way to make that happen that doesn’t infringe on anyone’s rights. And before you say “yeah but…the rich infringe upon the rights of the poor all the time,” remember that two wrongs don’t make a right.) No, it’s by raising the standard of living for the least wealthy until equalization occurs naturally.
Now I’m really starting to like you.
I couldn’t agree more. Google has changed into a dark force on the Internet in which their intentions are not in your favor.
I think Christina hit it exactly on the head.. Hypothetically, someone could semi automate auto blogs using Turk, pay $1 per post, or less, generate 100 blogs, 10 posts per blog for 10 weeks of “fresh content” and still only be out $100.. And who does that benefit?? Readers?? Nope, no readers on those blogs?? Writers?? Nope, no real writer would ever write like that for that little money.. Google?? Maybe, if that person was running 6 ad blocks from adsense and churning through the top paying terms for that blog run..
Couple that with a few other “tools” and you have a way to make a fair amount of money while contributing absolutely nothing of value to the internet community..
Nope, nothing evil here at all.. Good thing I don’t know anyone that does that..