Scaled Content Abuse

Let's talk web spam. Primarily, scaled content abuse: what is it and why should you care?

Scaled content abuse is one of those things you either learn about ahead of time (the easy way); or you learn about it after your site is hit with a spam penalty (the hard way).

It's not an unusual strategy to plan content around the keywords and topics a site performs well for - this falls in line with what your audience wants. This is what brings them back.

But if pages targeting these keywords and topics are being generated for the sole reason of clicks, and are devoid of effort, originality and editing, and provide no value to your audience, then you're looking at scaled content abuse.

And scaled content abuse = web spam.

I've heard this process described as "spun up SEO content to grow traffic".

Quick rant: "SEO content" is not a thing. Stop saying this. Stop trying to promote this. Just. Stop. Publish content on your site for your readers or potential customers, not for the search engines. If you can categorize your site's content into the buckets of "regular content" and "SEO content", just know that you're setting up the site for a short term win with a long term loss once it incurs a spam penalty.

/end rant.

Ahem.

How does it happen and why did it seem like a good idea?

Here's an entirely plausible real-world scenario: The decision-makers of a site want to grow traffic quickly and as economically as possible. So they hatch a plan to take the top-performing search queries to the site, match those to the top articles for those queries, use AI to create a two-paragraph summary, have a human editor add internal links so they can claim the post had human editing, and start spinning up articles.

The result is a bulk of new articles, with summaries that contain no new, interesting, or original information, that take very little effort to produce, and present the reader with articles that they may have already read.

This is what Google's Quality Raters Guidelines identifies as "large amounts of unoriginal content that provides little to no value to users."

What can you do if you discover your site is unwittingly publishing web spam?

Set the articles to 'noindex', while you determine:

• Whether the articles are worth rewriting with original content and new information
• If the articles would be better taken down or redirected
• Or if the articles should remain in their ‘noindex’ state and used on the site for the people who are already there.