Is SEO Ruing the Internet?

Search engine optimization, more commonly known as SEO, is writing that helps pages rank higher in a search engine. It’s one of the factors that the bots programmed to scour the internet and assign search engine page rankings are designed to account for. If keywords are mentioned enough times, the bots think the article is of importance or that actual people find it useful in some way. And so it ranks higher. Because of this, companies look for writers of SEO content to help boost their page ranking.

The problem with SEO is that businesses often hire writers with absolutely no concern for anything but making sure the keywords they ask for a placed a certain number of times, and at certain designated places within the content. In their defense, the businesses don’t always realize that all they’re getting from the “writers” they hire is some words cut and pasted, and then slightly reworded. It’s not always their fault. Sometimes it is. Some so-called content providers are accepting assignments to write 500 word SEO articles for as little as 50 cents, and agreeing to write up to 100 per day. And the people behind this practice are the article brokers. Check out some of the more popular freelancing sites and you’ll see for yourself. They scoop up all the writing assignments and then sell them to actual writers for next to nothing. And therein lies the problem.

Think about it. It takes time to write 500 thoughtful words on a subject. It takes even more time for a writer to edit their work. And if a person isn’t an “expert” on a subject, it takes time to research the topic he or she is writing about. So for the rate of pay that some writers are accepting for SEO assignments, they can’t possibly care about what they’re writing. And far too often, they’re just taking content already on the web, changing the wording enough to pass through plagiarism detectors, and putting it back on the web.

Businesses that want well written content for use on the internet need to be hiring actual writers and paying them fair wages. Not paying content providing sweatshops to send them essentially plagiarized content. Often, these sweatshop-style article brokers do nothing but scoop up decent freelancing assignments on the web and them sell the assignment to desperate people at ridiculously low wages. The sweatshop owner collects the fair wage of about $15 per 500 hundred words, and pays the actual writer of the content wages of maybe $2 for their work. Then they’re pocketing the other $13 for themselves. And at those rates, you really can’t blame the people writing content for not caring about the quality of their work. It’s the content providing sweatshops that are to blame.

In order for SEO to do what it’s designed to do and also give readers information they can actually use, a topic needs to be researched thoroughly, thought through, well written and carefully edited. Otherwise, the internet is going to end up being a useless wasteland of just meaningless words.

For that to happen, companies who need web content need to be hiring actual writers to provide actual content. And writers need to stop accepting these sweatshop assignments, so that there can be a return to being paid a fair market value for work. Then, for that fair wage, a writer can actually take the time to provide content that’s worth reading, thereby increasing the quality of the internet as a whole.

People who are not writers need to stop taking the assignments posted on freelancing websites and selling them to writers. Some of the so-called content providers who engage in this practice are as unscrupulous as to post as both an employer and as a freelancer on the exact same freelancing site. These “content providers” are nothing but article brokers.

So if you’re trying to engage in fair, ethical business practices and you’re looking for a freelance writer to provide you content, avoid these article brokers and hire actual writers to provide your SEO content. It’s pretty easy to identify these companies, since no single human being could ever provide a hundred 500 word articles in a day. And writers groups that are serving the interest of actually writers are never going to agree to sweatshop prices. When considering bids from so-called freelancers, keep that in mind. Doing so will not only bring you better quality content that you’re paying full price to these brokers for anyway, it will also contribute to an overall better web.


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