A nice thread has been started in the form of a rant by High Rankings Forum member "copywriter." In "It's Illegal And Unethical And They Know It!", she describes the recent fad of "creating unique content" by pasting together thoughts from different articles and other content already found on the Internet. Jill gets to the crux of the matter; describing it as “spammer software.”

...those spam machines that claim to produce unique original copy. The folks that use these and those that create it try to say that it's not stealing, because they're only taking a sentence from here, and another one from there.

This new "Frankenstein" content, as I call it, has the ability to not only look bad from a human perspective, but also to potentially dilute the effectiveness of some original content. People are jumping on the bandwagon in decrying this technique, rightfully so in my opinion. Rand makes a good action suggestion:

IMO, there are only two ways to solve this issue in the long term:
1. Dis-incentive the tactic - remove the monetary or traffic potential
2. Remove the ranking ability; this is up to the SE's algo teams

Speak your mind on the subject at High Rankings Forums (added 3/13: the software creator is now taking part in this discussion, which has really blossomed)

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