Long term effects of wholesale MFA autogeneration

[paul]

I have been following a thread on DP where a seller offers autogenerated content for keywords of your choice for $2.00 each in lots of 100. The "poor guy" has two helpers, is working non-stop and can't keep up with orders. Total cost per 500-1000 page site should be about $6 annually including a $0.99 .info, hosting and the $2.00 for "content".

My interest is in the consequences/implications/fallout 12-18 months from now when those domains have to be renewed at full price & the search engines have tweaked their algos and how that will effect those of us who write our own material and are in this for the long term.

Clearly the reputation of .info will go down even more.
Handcrafted pages should become relatively more valuable
There will be lots of expired domains available
Link sales made to owners of these sites could be very dangerous

Other thoughts ?

Paul

[Chris]

IMO focusing on quality will always be the best way to stable success.

It really pisses me off about the .info thing though. I have 1 site on a .info domain and I wish I had chosen a different domain for it because man .info domains suck now. Every penniless wannabe spammer from China gets a .info domain because they are cheap.

I've go so far as to ban .info email registrations from most of my forums.

Whoever made the decision to make those TLDs cheap totally has killed any long term value of that TLD. Might as well call them .spam.

[Cutter]

autogenerated content is blackhat stuff. Long term, it holds no value. In terms of buying it, forget it. The content alone isn't going to help you very much, its a combination of techniques basically involving: a hell of a lot more than 1000 pages (think millions), link spamming blogs and forums, thousands of domain names running on different ip addresses, and cloaking. Unless you are a skilled programmer than stuff is going to go way over your head.

I'm not very interested in things that have to be babysitted done every day, which puts blackhat out of the question. Besides, you end up with a business thats worth a few days earnings. Sound appealing to you?

[paul]

Cutter,
I understand that. I tried to make it clear I am speculating about the current consequences to legitimate publishers and opportunities down the road after the buyers crash and burn.

When a seller on DP can buy a $1,000 script to do the heavy lifting and is then able to get more orders that he can handle there are obviously going to be a lot of sites built. That one seller can probably sell customers 10,000? sites a week. Probably enough to force algo changes that potentially impact the rest of us. I have already been impacted. I have several .info sites where I could have gotten the .net or .org. I took the info because that seemed the best fit for a content site. Given Chris's comments, I am not sure where that leaves me.

I think we are seeing the development of expanding market where lots of people who don't really have a clue are looking for ways to get on the AdSense gravy train. It's kind of a negative instance of a long tail situation. At ninety-nine cents + $2.00 + a few cents for hosting it's almost free to try. Every bookstore has multiple copies of books on how to make money from AdSense; this just takes the work out of it. Lots of people will have a thousand bucks to throw at the "opportunity" which may make for "interesting times" for the rest of us.

[Cutter]

The problem is whenever these spamming tools go mass-market it leaves a huge footprint, which makes it easy for Google to clean up. I remember years ago when Amazon auto-generated affiliate apges dominated the rankings. Do you see much of those anymore?

In terms of auto-generation or "cookie cutter" sites in the hands of the "unskilled" long term there is minimal damage to experienced publishers. Honestly, $2 for a domain? Isn't $10 for a .com already freaking cheap?

The bottom line is unless you have the ability to drive a ton of traffic volume, you are going to struggle to make much of any money off adsense.

In terms on .info domains.. do a 301 redirect to a new .com and move all your content over. I could see reasons to own a .info, but you just have to adapt if it looks like it could have a negative impact on your business.