Article Blogging for Traffic

In its ongoing bid to completely take over the internet, Google offers a number of interesting and useful services which you can generally subscribe to for free. One of these is called Google Alerts and its premise is very simple. You tell which words or combinations of words you are interested in and Google will send you an email when these words are used somewhere on the internet.

I use it to keep track of "interesting" discussions about big feet, large shoes and so on. So for instance, you might get an email telling you someone on a forum was asking where they could get big cycling shoes. You could then hop on that forum and tell them you had some in stock.

However, it also generates a lot of white noise results which either don't have much to do with what you are looking for, or are complete drivel with little value. An example of the latter arrived in my onbox today, entitled "Large size shoes: Wediabuzz.com".

The article it links to has been written on the Wediabuzz website, whose aim is not exactly clear. It appears simply to be a list of poorly written articles which fall into such useful categories as "162, 173, 181 and Business" Trying to find out what the site is for I can only divine the following:

"What is WediaBuzz?

We are a group of seven individuals that represent innovation, web development, information technology, analytics, data, business, news and community who came together to collectively share knowledge that will help our company move forward in a Web 2.0 world and beyond.

Our mission is to develop and provide a Web technology framework, the processes, tools, best practices and standards body and make those available to media organizations in every project going forward."

Yup, sounds good to me.

The article I am referring to about large shoes also seems to have been written in a similar style:

"Finding large shoes might be a difficult task to everybody. Most of the store shops would not have plus size collections, and you might be finding hard to get a plus size shoes that fit you. If you are worried about plus size shoes, then online shoe shopping could be the best option. Shoebuy provides large size shoe collections, and you feel very comfortable."

Really? Shoebuy seems like a fairly legitimate site with a lot on offer and it looks like they are based in the US. But it seems unlikely they commissioned someone to write this for them and were then happy enough to pay for it afterwards. It doesn't get any better later in the text either:

"If you know the right size, then these shoes might fit you. Most of the shops would not the plus size footwear; if they have also they don’t be stylish or trendy. The Shoebuy.com provides you great deals and you could also get shoebuy promotional code before proceeding to get the offer. Keep in mind, these codes would be available for some period of time, at the end of the month it expires. So you could also update by another coupon codes.".

Well, that's pretty insightful. If you know the right size of shoe for you, the shoes at Shoebuy might fit you. Hmm, but what about ladies shoes? Do you have any useful insights on that for me?

"Many large shoes, comes with high heels and this might cause you back pain. So if you are buying shoes, avoid buying footwear with heels. If you are looking for shoes that would fit you perfectly, then you must know the correct size. In today’s fashion, every woman started walking with heels, without knowing it risks and effects. You could make use of high heel footwear for some parties, or any occasion. For daily wear, this heel might not be the right option for you, so keep in mind, and make use of the footwear."

Still on about making sure you get the correct size. Sounds like these guys know their stuff.

The above probably serves its purposes inasmuch as Shoebuy is mentioned in an article on another site which presumably gives credible backlinks. But how valuable are those backlinks and what is the point of the actual article?

The internet appears to be swimming with this sort of traffic building content just now, so I suppose the moral is be careful how much you ask Google to alert you to, in order to avoid wading through all of the dross out there.