When Large Businesses Game the System

There has been a fair amount of news recently about AOL's goal to re-brand its image from one that speaks to poor user experience, mediocre content, and a mailbox full of SPAM to... well I'm not exactly sure what they're transitioning to at the moment. If one were to listen to what current AOL CEO and former Associated Content co-founder Tim Armstrong has to say on the subject, it doesn't sound as if much has changed.

Over the past two weeks, details about AOL's new business model have been slowly revealed to the tech press and it looks as if Armstrong is hedging his bets on rebuilding AOL as a closed provider of in-network link SPAM and junk content.

It's not the freshest or most interesting idea, but it's simple enough to understand; use basic algorithms and automated systems to track the highest queried terms and then assign these terms to contract writers to produce topical content to drive traffic. The theory goes that if you can produce content that covers hot topics and then artificially increase article relevancy and visibility by utilizing inbound links from your own micro-sites, then your new content will be propelled to the top of search engine rankings and your traffic will increase with it. It's a content strategy that's three shades off from being completely honest, and it's one that spammers and malicious sites have been using for years in order to increase visits. It's also the exact model used by in-demand media companies like the aforementioned Associated Content to saturate the web with some of the dullest and most bounce-worthy information imaginable.

Some have already deemed AOL's new strategy as a long-term failure by simply assuming that the search engines will eventually massage out the inherent inadequacies that allow this sort of content to win out in the first place. But the truth of the matter is that junk content is still content, and so as long as the content on a page is coherent and readable, it still has a chance of winning out over far more interesting entries. Answers.com, eHow, and About.com are just three examples of sites that employ similar strategies to the one that AOL is attempting (albeit in a slightly better fashion), and they have yet to be penalized by search engines in any significant way.

This is actually going to be interesting from a search engine marketing standpoint; not only because it allows us to go back over and evaluate our own methodology, but also because AOL's high-profile approach to content creation will give us a window into what the search engines will or won't tolerate over the course of time. There's no doubt that AOL's venture into this area is due to a lack of policing by the search engines. In fact, the entire business model is reliant on the fact that search engines won't make any sweeping or sudden changes to their algorithms. The question now, though, is whether or not this marketing strategy is capable of long-term sustainability.