Killing my spam slowly

Last year I set up a series of domain using auto-generated text along clear verticals.

I’m not a programmer, nor technically clever - I used a very basic method anyone with HTML knowledge could have done.

I stripped out sentences from online articles, hosted them remotely, and built a network of pages that would take a random selection of these sentences and build a page from them whenever refreshed. Links from various related sites would follow.

At the time I thought it was a perfectly clever way to help for SEO purposes.

After all, the pages had useful information on them for human users, didn’t they?

It was only when I tried to ensure full indexing of the domains that it began to dawn on me that I’d actually created a network of spam. I’d become a “search engine spammer”.

I’m not keen on that title.

Regardless of my sometimes blundering way of getting through life, I’m a person of good intentions. In this instance, I thought I’d created something useful for everybody.

I soon began to see problems with the network.

First, it took longer than anticipated to get the network fully indexed by search engines. Then it looked like the limited use of content spread across a large volume of pages was beginning to trip duplicate content filters.

So I began a second network of sites, much more focused on content. No scrapers, autogeneration, or similar cheap tricks - actual content.

Trouble is, the quality of sites is variable. Some of them look distinctly low quality or even abandoned - not because of my intentions, but because I over-stretched myself.

Working alone to constantly update dozens of sites everyday left me trapped in donkey work when I needed to focus on strategy and planning. So I stalled the donkey.

I’m about to begin a new phase of website building. Portals. Articles, directories, and forums, all rolled together on individual domains built into clear vertical niches. Not an AdSense ad between them, either.

This time I’ll be employing help, too.

Hopefully trying to have good intentions will actually become a greater reality here. After all, my focus is no longer about links - it’s about clickstream.

Imagine - a network of actually useful unique content sites. Wouldn’t that be nice?

Perhaps I’ll look back in a year’s time and feel I’ll simply created nothing better than spam.

In the meantime, as for my original network - it’s being slowly put to sleep. I removed almost three-quarters of it today, and the rest will follow soon.

I don’t think anyone will really notice, though. Search engines have been clever enough to devalue the autogenerated pages anyway.

To survive in SEO with long-term goals, I have to focus more and more on human users.

That’s why I’m now killing my spam slowly.