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A coworker of mine recently showed me a video demo of what i think is a fairly well known product that integrates keyword suggesions, article databases, and adwords to let you create "sites" with copy related to your keywords, quickly.
Is the point of these types of products to create a site that gets indexed and gets search traffic? I mean, it seems like "picking high paying keywords" to create sites for would be fruitless, unless you had some powerful SEO behind you (or an ad budget -- but then you'd essentially have to do keyword arbitrage)
the only thing i can think of that would make sense is to use a product like this to find keywords that are high paying, then come up with a site that can get indexed well for very specific searches.
in other words, pick "widgets" then get some articles that are about "widget in a phrase" -- then, rank highly for those phrases. however, in the case of the demo i saw, the user of the product was taking articles from online article databases. If everyone's got those same articles to build sites from, you end up being able to successfully build a "site" quickly, but you have no competitive advantage other than whatever SEO you can do.
the whole thing seems like a way to be really productive, but then you realize the hard part isn't making a site, it's making a site that gets lots of good will & links. a site built upon copying a few articles and placing adwords in there doesnt seem like it would generate very much good will.
or maybe i'm missing something?
then you realize the hard part isn't making a site, it's making a site that gets lots of good will & links
I don't think you're missing anything at all -- you sound like the voice of reason and sanity to me.
it almost seems like you're "fishing" (with an f) -- dangling some content on a hook in front of the fish making websites, and getting them to "bite" by giving YOU some link-love.
still, though. if i could crank out a bunch of sites... i find that my sites do well on the long tail - they get lots of odd searches. if i could crank out a bunch of sites, i'm bound to do well on some of them. If making a site takes 30 minutes, well, doing 50 or 100 of them and making 25 cents per day on each of them adds up...
a site built upon copying a few articles and placing adwords in there doesnt seem like it would generate very much good will.
Well said. Good will, in the form of unsolicited inbound links from pertinent sites, is what pushes you up in the serps (and it also brings in direct traffic, of course). If a site is cookie-cutter, no one finds any reason to link to it. The most important part of SEO is having original content, and no amount of clever techniques will get around that in the long-term.
