How crap content defines you

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Sep 4, 2007

I was doing my rounds of the blogs the other day and found it interesting reading some particularly crap content from people I respect within the industry. Without naming anyone, one blogger was saying that the main reason people choose an open source CMS is so that they can tinker with the core code. The other blogger was saying that you are crazy to use a CMS on a site with less than 100 pages of content.

The arguments put forward by these bloggers to support their viewpoint were a bit weak, at best.

Were they wrong?

In my mind, there is no such thing as a wrong opinion, providing it's supported by reasoned logic. These opinions weren't, and the guy making the point about not using a CMS on sites with less than 100 pages was using Wordpress and had only 53 blog pages indexed. Anyone else see the irony in this?

Filler

It occurred to me that these people were probably writing "filler" content for their websites. These weren't well constructed articles designed to be high quality link bait, rather they were designed to pad out the site with content and secure a bit of long-tail search traffic. I'm guilty of this too.

But from the titles of the articles you would think they were authoritative. As an intelligent blog follower, it's a little insulting to read content that clearly hasn't had any thought go into it, but assumes you won't notice.

I'm complaining here about publishing rubbish that isn't clearly marked as rubbish.

3 good ways to present content

Aaron Wall of SEO Book posts like there's no tomorrow, and the scroll bar on my RSS reader has trouble keeping up. His content is short and sweet, generally quite interesting, but clearly marked as opinion (by the style of the writing). His style seems to be very much "This is what I think is going to happen, you can take this advice or not".
A List Apart posts new content a couple of times a month, but it's generally worth waiting for. The content is presented as "best of breed" web techniques, and I know it's well thought out because someone has gone to the trouble of doing a custom illustration for each article.
My Mesothelioma website is clearly shite (I'm too ashamed to give you the link), but if the domain name wasn't a total giveaway, the multiple Adsense blocks should be a fair indication to the user that the content is total crap. The website does not pretend to be anything it's not.

This post is not about bad content, it's about bad content being found in good places.

Bloggers, if you are going to publish shite filler content for your websites, at least have the decency to plaster adsense all over the place as a warning sign to readers :)

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Comments

Chris Giddings - You're not wrong... - Sep 6, 2007

Your assessment that crap content helps to define you is certainly correct. Given that all bloggers have their off-days where they post crap content I do think it's a staple of the blogosphere and I also believe that opinions can change on topics.

If you think the guys crap article on OSS CMS systems being used only to fiddle with the code is a load full... tell him why. Talk to him. See if you can change his mind and shed light on the merits of using the OSS CMS systems.

I do like that you used your site as a medium for rebuttal and that you put AdSense everywhere for the sake of making your point at the end.

Harvey - Sep 6, 2007

Blogs rule because they cut straight past the stale corporate promotion style and let someone's personality shine through.

The upside is you get to read real opinions, the downside is that you get to read the odd "off day" post, sponsored post, or filler post. I'm not really complaining, it's all part of blogging.

The post about OSS didn't have comments enabled, hence the post here. For the record, I think very few people want to tinker under the hood of their open source CMS. But those that do can share their changes / fixes, and so a strong OS community can do more with a piece of software than a small team of commercial developers.
Having source code also provides peace of mind - it prevents vendor lock-in and gives the customer options should the relationship with the developer go sour.

Glad you noticed my adsense - it's insurance in case someone thinks this post is filler, so I don't get labeled a hypocrite :)

Alex Mielus - Asa gandesc EU - Sep 6, 2007

Bloggers, if you are going to publish shite filler content for your websites, at least have the decency to plaster adsense all over the place as a warning sign to readers :)

Sooo true! I think EVERY webmaster has it's portion of MFA and link/article sites. Anyone who doesn't ... just write here :)

But still these AdSense sites pay the bills (in my case they are) and they are fairly constant used by people to get payed reviews on them.