I receive plenty of junky offers for “content” or invitations to accept “guest posts” on this blog. Most of this stuff is trashy attempts to game Google with some SEO tricks, and it doesn’t work. Spammy recycled content written for self-serving purposes does little good here, and frankly, little good for the companies seeking the search engine juice, because Google has decided to discount and even penalize anyone who plays these games.
Accordingly, I was a bit skeptical when I received an offer to license an old posting from this blog through written.com. Then, as I read the offer, and understood the concept, it made perfect sense, and, as far as I can tell, would pass the Google smell test. In the deal, if I accept the highest-paid licensing offer, my content would “move” to the client’s site for the period of the license purchase and disappear from this blog. People searching for the relevant posting would find it — and the client site. I would be paid for the traffic and the site’s right to use my posting.
In this model, duplicate content penalties wouldn’t be much of a problem, the paying site would presumably receive useful and appropriate content for its purposes, and I might make a bit of money for postings that are essentially history buried deep in this blog’s archives.
We’ll see. Will this service provide a legitimate, effective tool for client-based content generation, or will it evolve into another SEO trick, doomed to fail on the constant battlefront for originality and innovation in the Internet? ?I don’t know yet.
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