The scamming that goes on in our industry in the form of stock content

It was a call from a prospective client that made me aware of this company. I’m not going to publish their name here, but they’re an Internet marketing company whose CEO is a practicing dentist. Sounds good so far. The prospective client wanted me to compare what we did to what they would do, because, as he put it, he was “blown away” by what they knew about business listings and map search.

I’m just going to share with you one thing I learned about this company. When I called, the company representative gave me an example of a website project they had just launched that he was tremendously proud of. I examined the website, and I found several pages of stock content.

Unfortunately, we see this a lot. This, in spite of the fact that stock content will kill your website. But, of course, it makes it very cheap to create a website. Several very prominent dental website companies do this. In fact, the website company recommended by the American Dental Association, PBHS, uses stock content. Do they do this in ignorance? I have a hard time believing that, that a major player in the dental website industry like PBHS would be ignorant of a fundamental principle of search engine optimization. But if they know this, why do they sell sites with stock content? Because people buy them, I’m sure. And they buy them because they don’t know any better.

But this company I was investigating took this whole unseemly side of our business to a new level, attaching authorship tags to these sites with stock content. Let me show you a screen shot of search results so you can see what I mean. I took what looked like should have been a unique sentence from their client’s page on sedation dentistry and found that it was copied, word-for-word, on twelve sites. That’s what we do to find duplicate content. But in this case, it is combined with the authorship tag, which causes the dentist’s photo to be displayed with the search results:

I got a sick feeling when I saw this, for these poor dentists. This company is claiming to Google, on behalf of these dentists, that they are each independent authors of stock content. It’s one thing to sully the reputation of a website by publishing copied content. It’s another thing to sully the reputation of living people by portraying them to Google as plagiarists when they are simply innocent dupes.

I’m sorry to be so harsh against this company. I don’t mean to imply that they are sleazy SEO people. As contrasted with PBHS, they are a small company, and I’m guessing that they simply don’t know any better – that they haven’t taken the trouble to learn their business well enough to know what they are doing. At least I hope that’s the case, rather than that they are knowingly doing this to their clients.