Gaming The System Is A Shortcut To Failure

There Really Are No Cheat Codes

by Paul Grimsley

Quality content — it is about that simple. Spun articles, plagiarism, link-farming — whatever secret weapon it is that you think you have in your arsenal, it is in the sights of the big social media companies, and they want to eliminate it.

What do they want? A quality experience for users of their platform. How are they going to get that? With quality content. Netflix has it, Amazon has it, Hulu has it. And as the online experience has diversified and sources have thinned out, each of these players in the digital entertainment sphere have become content creators.

For a while blogging was the big thing, so being able to write and create in that way was an important thing. As it became easier to link and share from other platforms, people began to create and link-blog more. Their blogs were not dissimilar to their Facebook walls.

You read about a lot of schemes that supposedly boil these demands from social networks to their bare bones, giving the idea that you just do this one thing and then your ranking and your in-flow of traffic will go through the roof. And it may be true that some of your stats will spike if you take one of these short-cuts, but that skeletal fix you put in is going to be revealed to have no meat to it. It is the Emperor’s New Clothes, and it won’t take long for the search engines to see that.

The thing is quality content doesn’t necessarily even mean that you have to have a professional writer writing it for you. Is it real, and is it your story? Good. That’s often better than anything else a stranger might write for you.

Sometimes those articles on life-hacks are great, and they provide a neat way to do something that you may not have thought of on your own. However, things that try to trick their way through a system like Google’s search engine algorithm are really just a con.