The Internet is Full of Crap

1 CommentOff The Cuff, SEO & SEM

The internet is full of crap, but not everything on the internet is crap is what has been coming across my monitor these past few hours. I recently was updating a Wikipedia page with a link to a well written review from Examiner.com when I found out that Examiner.com is on Wikipedia’s blacklist. This lead me to check out what other sites may be blocked and eventually I stumbled upon a growing List of Content Farms, that should probably be changed to “sites I don’t like”.

While I can understand that many search engines want to cut down on the amount of spam sites that pollute our search results, I would like us to take a breath, hold and exhale. I think a great write up that conveyed many of my same opinions on this matter was done here by SEO Theory.

And yet, by the PBS-Ickipedia definition, just about any news organization that publishes a 150 word blurb about breaking news must be a content farm, right? Wouldn’t Twitter be a Content Farm? And Ickipedia itself, right? – Michael Martinez

Personally, I think people are going a bit overboard when they claim sites like Examiner, eHow and Answers should be blacklisted from search engines. They aren’t any different than Yahoo, Google News, Mashable or even Slashdot. There is a difference between SEO and Spam, just as there is a difference between Content Farms and User Generated Content sites, though it’s not always easy to describe the difference, as one user elegantly put it:

It reminds me of art and porn – we know it when we see it and everyone defines “it” differently. – marcohmann

1 Comment

  1. anon

    Reply

    I just edited a Wikipedia page citing an completely legitimate interview piece on examiner; the cited page mostly consisted of paragraphs of quoted answers by the interviewee. It was (is) a pure news piece – DENIED.

    I find it to be far more alarming that their active editors have a fierce insistence on approving Liberal MSM sites and rejecting anything else. In other words they will permit an editorial passage from the Washington Post and New York Times (each of whom formerly were impeccable reliable news outlets, best in the world, but currently are fundamentally unreliable yellow journalism straight editorial rags).

    The PBS-ikipedia moniker is completely apt. If PBS runs a show saying that transgenderism is now normal and condoned by the world at large, that’s greenlit and printed as fact. If a source is a Liberal mouthpiece (which PBS has sunk to become), it’s printed as fact. If not, it’s either blacklisted, or citations are removed.

    By the way, that’s their worst transgression, most egregiously on ANYTHING involving political sentiment (most common: Orange Man Bad accepted; converse rejected). On all manner of other items which are subjective – notably, passing judgment on entertainment (e.g. movies, TV shows, music) – they are so completely un-encyclopedic that they cancel out all of the immense and difficult work that honest factual contributors have done to make Wikipedia be deemed credible. Their assertions on music are ridiculous, coming from an “online encyclopedia”; they 100% greenlight musical opinions from “organized” opinion site allmusic.com as fact. It’s truly ridiculous.

    For objective items (mathematics, geography, planetary distances, etc.) they are highly accurate. However they also write on subjective topics, and they are biased and agenda-driven, and they back each other up. They are absolutely laughable on political figures (except published numerical results)! If it’s a Liberal position, they echo the CNN narrative as encyclopedic. If it’s Republican, they parade the CNN narrative as encyclopedic. If it’s Independent, they find a Paul Krugman or WaPo article calling the person a “conspiracy theorist.” This is not sour grapes. They do this *over and over and over.*

Leave Comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.