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 Web site, 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.

Google Says Quality is Dirt Cheap, Don’t Hire Copywriters is a post from: Christina Gleason - Founder of Phenomenal Content LLC

I’ve been working on a lot of content for my article writing clients.  There is a lot of information “out there” on the Internet that writers like me use for their research.  Some topics have more information available than others, and we all have a short list of Web sites – or classes of Web sites – that can be considered trusted sources.

Like most Internet Marketers can attest, the .gov pages are pure gold – although marketers value link juice from these sites more than the informational resources they provide. Information on most government sites can be considered trustworthy, so writers often use these sites in their research when applicable.

Major news sites are generally pretty accurate, although writers need to be wary of the use of statistics and editorial bias.  Breaking news is less accurate than in-depth pieces, but reporters have a vested interest in the accuracy of their words.

Then there are a handful of professional or expert sites – Web sites run by doctors, dentists, lawyers, accountants, architects, and other professionals. We trust what they professionals say because they are the experts in their fields. The information contained on their Web sites is assumed to be an extension of each professional’s personal knowledge base, and many writers use the sites in the research without verifying the accuracy of the information. After all, these are licensed  professionals, and they wouldn’t want to risk their reputations by providing false information.

The problem is that many of these professionals do not possess professional writing skills – or if they do, they don’t have the time to write their own Web site content because they are busy doing the work they are paid to do.  Web site content is either outsourced or completed by another member of the office staff.  Because the quality of the research depends largely on the quality of the writer, this is a very risky proposition.

I’ve been using some of these professional Web sites as research resources for my client work.  I like to make sure my content is more comprehensive than other content out there, so I use multiple sources.  I encountered my first instance of false information last week.  Three more articles uncovered even more instances of blatantly inaccurate information this morning.  Because many of these professional resources cannibalize each other, they tend to parrot the false information found on their competitors’ Web sites.  Who is writing this stuff?

Sadly, the writers who were charged with creating the content for these professionals were not very diligent. To be honest, a quick glance at Wikipedia would have told the writers that the information was wrong.  There is something  wrong when Wikipedia is more reliable than an article published on your accountant’s Web site. How do I know that Wikipedia was right?  I Googled a few related search terms to determine which  information was correct. Wikipedia won every time.

If you are a writer, you need to check your sources. You need to use a variety of different types of sources. Using four doctors’ Web sites in your research is not the same as using a doctor’s Web site, the FDA site, an article from a medical journal, and an article from the New York Times. You can’t take shortcuts if you want to protect your own reputation and the reputation of your writing clients.

If you are in the market for buying content, make sure you trust the writers you end up hiring. You know you’re not going to get anything resembling proper English if you hire $1.00/article writers from India, and you’re not going to get diligent research from a writer who is trying to crank out enough $10 articles as quickly as possible to pay the bills. You’re going to have to do your own research to make sure your writer is going to do theirs.

Because honestly, you don’t want to find out that the information on your Web site is less valuable than the information on Wikipedia.

Check Your Sources – The Prevalence of False Information Online is a post from: Christina Gleason - Founder of Phenomenal Content LLC

In case you missed it, my name is Christina Gleason. You may be more familiar with me by my former identity, QualityGal. Until February 9, 2009, I was the Content Manager at We Build Pages. Oh sure, that wasn’t my official title. But I created the content writing team from the ground up, recruiting and managing over 250 writers and editors to write thousands of pages of content, so I think it was a fairer description of my job than anything else that was bandied about.

I helped develop a  proprietary writer panel for the management of writer assignments. Sadly, I only got to use the new incarnation for two business days before I was let go. This tool had been in development since July 2008, and I’m sad that I won’t be able to enjoy it without all the bugs.

I developed an online style manual along with two of my editors, Jen and Michelle, which helped promote the quality of the content we produced. I also developed several very basic tutorials about SEO writing.

With the experience I gained from my time as a Google Quality Rater, I’ve always ensured that the content produced by the writing team I managed was valuable to users. User intent is so firmly ingrained in my brain that I would never, ever attach myself to any “content” that could be construed as spam or trickery. And that’s not because Google penalizes spam and trickery; that’s because it’s the right thing to do. I want to help make the Web a better place.

I’m now a solo act. I’m available for freelance work. Keep your eyes peeled for more information about my services and introductory rates.

Formerly Known as QualityGal is a post from: Christina Gleason - Founder of Phenomenal Content LLC