One of the major aspects of today’s web production is content. Search engines use it as the key indicator determining web sites’ ranking, which makes content a very efficient SEO tool. Search engines like content. Advertisers like content. Surfers like content. Everyone seems to be happy.

At the same time, popularity of text ad blocks (Adsense and alike) has turned content into the “fat soil” from which text ad blocks “draw” all the necessary resources, such as relevant and / or profitable keywords. If we want monetizing our traffic, we have to make sure this “soil” is properly “fertilized”.

As a result, web producers have made quantity, update rate and presence of keywords stipulated by commercial necessity a priority. These factors have dramatically diminished the informative value of web content as such. Internet as a global information source has become “a massive garbage collection” where questionable quality and keyword oriented content is mixed with numerous reformatted clones of the latter. As a result of this tendency, finding relevant information is now becoming harder and harder.

Of course, surfers’ opinion is still a factor (which means that surfers will tend to ignore pure quality web sites and keep coming back to the ones they like). Unfortunately few genuine content sites are just being lost within the “massive garbage collection”. More web resources there are in total - less significant the surfers’ factor becomes. In addition to that, the algorithm of today’s search engines does not take into consideration the informative value, which means that in most cases, genuine content sites can be barely found by surfers.

If someone has genuine quality content, they are not going to publish it online anymore.
Once they do, it will be immediately copied, rewritten and ultimately stolen from the author. Generating profitable text ad blocks without making sure the content is packed with appropriate keywords is also difficult. Producing genuine content for the internet has become obsolete because there is no point in distributing “real” while you can just substitute it with “fake” and achieve better ROI and CTR. As soon as somebody has quality content they will publish an e-book or even move the content offline. Time is money. It has never been as obvious as today. When I need quality and trustworthy information, I don’t have time to be searching for it among piles of garbage. I would rather go to a book store and buy a well structured, certified and up-to-date piece of content.

Everything I’ve said sounds pretty bad but fortunately internet is a complex system that constantly regulates itself by keeping the balance between its informative, commercial and technological components, and like any other system it is quite sensitive to deviations, which may potentially harm its normal functioning. The principles of internet marketing are evolving. So does the concept of online search. The so-called semantic search is one of the innovations meant to improve the relevancy of content based search. This evolution lets us hope that one day, the overall quality of online content will dramatically improve.