The New Internet

In my quest for a little extra cash, I went to rentacoder.com (on Erika's suggestion -- thanks, Erika) to see what writing and editorial work was available. I was both amused and shocked to see a new Internet emerging -- not one where content is written for content's sake, but one where content is written for search engine's sake. There were all these jobs looking for writers to produce original, keyword-rich content for their sites, to attract the search engines. Not that the content would have any real use but to go and raise up their search engine ranking. This is sillier than silly. They did specify that these would have to be articles that made the reader feel like they were really getting something of value -- even though the target was not the reader but the search engine. What was even sillier to me was the idea that they were only going to pay between $3 and $5 an article and they expected articles (original ones, no plagiarism or cut and paste) of between 500 and 800 words -- between 1 and two and a half pages -- for this same $5. Then they were asking for not just one article, but usually at least 10 at a time, and one site wanted 360 articles. (At least they were willing to pay up to $3600, but $10 is still too little in my opinion.) Now the secret to attracting the search engines is to have lots of content and have it coming in on a constant basis. Trying to force content (and pay for it with slave wages!) is not going to give the people quality content. And if they don't find the content of quality, they won't keep coming back. Have any of you considered paying someone to write content for your websites? And if so, what do you think is a fair payment to offer? Judith