My own approach to copywriting is definitely on the casual side. I arrived at this point via a lifetime of writing direct response copy that seeks to get a human being off his/her ass and filling out a reply coupon.

Anybody tasked with such a challenge soon learns that lead generation calls for a particular type of copy. And that overly complex language merely gets in the way.

This has almost certainly coloured my view of what makes for good copy. And yet, I can’t help wondering whether anybody will consider the following to be good copy?

There are 3 nodes of relevance to integrate holistically into an internet marketing campaign to ensure a healthy, robust online presence; those nodes or rather prerequisites are SEO, Syndication and Social Media.

Huh? What the f*** is that all about?

What makes this egregious piece of crap especially (cough) egregious is that it appears in the introductory teaser for a blog article. It’s supposed to persuade me that I want/need to read the article it promotes.

You can bet your bottom, middle and top dollar that I don’t want to read whatever follows that particular introduction. What I do want to do is remove my eyes and soak them bleach, just remove the stain left by that jumble of obfuscation.

My guess is this article was not written with human beings in mind. I suspect the intended audience is googlebot, and the objective is a push the author’s site further up Google’s results pages.

From time-to-time I’ve railed at Google for hijacking the net with its damned silly SEO rules that force everybody to play damned silly games as they try to worm their way to the top of page one. I’m not going to do that today (ahem). Instead, I’m going to rant about something else.

If you take a look around the web these days, you’ll find even worse content than the confusing nonsense in the above example. And it’s all thanks to a rather sordid little invention known as an article spinner.

The purpose of this nefarious little device is to take an article written in plain English, and ‘re-spin’ it many times over with slightly different words. The end result is a series of completely ‘different’ articles. Different in that they contain different words, strung together by a mindless automaton that has no idea if the resulting mess makes any sense at all.

What a ‘brilliant’ idea. Why I could run this article through a spinner, end up with 100 unique pieces of text. I could then pollute the web with my totally ‘unique’ content, and get myself a whopping 100 inbound contextual links – just like that.

Of course there’s one small flaw in this nefarious attempt to fool Google. The ‘spinning’ is being done by a computer program that lacks the ability to write proper English sentences. Such programs tend to spit out unreadable crap that was obviously not written by a real person. The resulting garbage fools no-one (and may not fool googlebot either).

It is a complete waste of time. Please stop doing it.

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