I went to a little doodad called EssayGenerator which cranks out an essay for you in no time flat. These essays are a bit on the silly side, they all say basically the same thing, and they don’t always make a lot of sense. Here is a snippet from an article I whipped up on Using Free Articles.
“Let us commence a journey into the much traveled topic of using free articles. I find my self constantly drawn back to the subject of using free articles. While much has been written on its influence on contemporary living, using free articles is not given the credit if deserves for inspiring many of the worlds famous painters. It is an unfortunate consequence of our civilizations history that using free articles is rarely given rational consideration by those most reliant on technology, many of whom fail to comprehend the full scope of using free articles. Hold onto your hats as we begin a journey into using free articles. Comparisons between Roman Society and Medieval Society give a clear picture of the importance of using free articles to developments in social conduct. I will not insult the readers intelligence by explaining this obvious comparison any further. When Sir Bernard Chivilary said ‘hounds will feast on society’ he could have been making a reference to using free articles, but probably not. A society without using free articles is like a society without knowledge, in that it clearly plays a significant role amongst the developing middle classes.”
It goes on like this for quite a while, like for 550 words or so. I could almost see myself using this bit of silliness as a starting point fro my own writing. The articles change slightly when you hit the enter button using the same keywords, but they are just odd. But at least they are sort of original content. Sort of.
There are, according to Google, over a billion pages of free articles. One Billion Pages of free articles. Just skipping through the ones on the first page of returns I found all kinds of way cool stuff. Most of them want nothing more than credit for the article, but that is the rub. Picking a title at random I liked, and then pasting that title into Google, got a return of 1,400,000 pages. There is little SEO to be gained by publishing a post that has already been published a million and half times. The whole point of original content is to get search engines to like you and give a top ten page rank. Using free articles will not do that. Not unless you change them, change their titles and give them your own slant. In other words, just write your own damned articles.
Jonathan has a few good points about Scraped Articles, which is just plain stealing. I tried to find someone writing something positive about using free articles, but all the blogs I found had an Alexa ranking in the millions, which is not good at all. One of them did advise just rewriting what you find, which is still a form of plagiarism, isn’t it? I think I might use them as a source of inspiration, as if I need help coming up with crap to talk about.
Of course, places like Digg, Reddit, Propellor, Newsvine, and all the other Social Networks have discovered that the easiest way to get tens of thousands of pages is to have someone else write them for you. As a blogger who cranks out my own pages, some better than others, but all mostly my own drivel, getting tens of thousands of pages is going to take a lot of time. Still, I do have thirty or forty years ahead of me, so maybe I can get there without resorting to canned content. Maybe.
