A quick thanks to whoever wrote this “Realtime lip-sync in Flash” tutorial with code over at Pixel Envision. I’m sure it was not somebody named “Admin,” but that’s all I can find on the page for a name. Anyhow, it was helpful, and I appreciate it.
This causes me to meditate on Google for a bit. There is a whole industry for SEO (“search engine optimization”). They create and manipulate content in order to bring websites of their customers or financial interests up in the search rankings.
How many times have you gone to a page on some topic of interest and had your hope die? At first the page or the link to it looked promising. But then you realized that this page only superficially resembled a Real Page. Maybe some algorithm had scraped together a facade of content. Or maybe there was a human writer involved, but only some underpaid drone that spent two minutes throwing near-nonsense together.
When you see this kind of fake job, it’s being done for SEO. Entire networks of websites are created for no other reason than to make the target content on one website more credible. Bots try to post links on any blog, forum, social network, or commenting platform by imitating (usually poorly) the messages that real people would generate.
But Google gets smarter all the time about distinguishing useful and interesting content from tactical bullshit. This makes me root for Google, because it has the potential to raise the intelligence of the entire Internet. When low-effort garbage is buried in obscurity where it belongs, the smart strategy for anyone wanting to get attention on the web is to make an authentic contribution–something that people really want.
The helpful article I referenced at the top is a good example of this type of contribution. And I’m happy to link to it in order to push them up a tiny bit higher in Google’s estimation.