The Wall Street Journal has an article by Lee Gomes that looks into the cheesy world of content that is written on the cheap to lure traffic from search engines. The content example Gomes uses in his article is "colloidal silver."
Curious to learn more about the process, I bid on some writing jobs on the Web sites where these transactions occur. (I described myself quite honestly: as a Journal reporter interested in freelance work who might also write a Journal story about writing for Web sites.)
I managed to get underbid on numerous jobs before snaring one from a Web entrepreneur I would come to know as "Whirlywinds." I would have to write 50 articles, each 500 words long. Topics to be assigned. Pay: $100. For everything.
My first assignment came a few days later. "The topic would be 'colloidal silver,' " Whirlywinds informed me. But then he added a caveat: "Please EXCLUDE any negative comments, as I sell this product online."
Colloidal silver is one of those bits of medical quackery that thrive on the unregulated Web. I told Whirlywinds I'd rather pass.
Gomes says colloidal silver thrives on the "unregulated web." A search on Technorati shows 2,000 results for Colloidal silver and many of them look splogish at first glance. Note: If you raise the authority slider up to "a little authority" this knocks the total down to a little over 300.
Google BlogSearch returns over 11,000 results including some very obvious splogs listed in the related blogs section. BlogPulse gives 900+ results and IceRocket.com gives over 2,000 results. A regular Google search gives over 2 million results for colloidal silver.
Lee Gomes was correct that colloidal silver is a big spam term. There is clearly far more spam about this particular term on the web than there is in the blogosphere. Using this particular term the best blog search results come from using Technorati with the authority slider set on the "a little authority" setting. However, you would risk filtering out some genuine colloidal silver blog posts using this option. Google Blogsearch did the worst job of filtering out splogs -- at least colloidal silver splogs anyway.
