RSS - Great tool or the latest version of spam

You can't go many places on the Internet these days without hearing about the virtues of RSS. As a marketing tool, communication tool, distribution tool, it certainly has some wonderful attributes. But, as with many useful Internet tools, it now is in danger of becoming this year's comment spam.

The Internet marketing guru crowd has a knack for finding the easy way to get short term marketing results for things and then packaging them up as the next great thing. The net result is a white hot tool that burns out in a blaze of overuse and search engine abuse.

In my opinion, RSS is headed down that path. There is no denying its long term usefulness as a means for delivering information and the next round of web browsers will certainly incorporate RSS reading, but one of the great values of RSS when it comes to blogs in particular, is the ability to distribute frequently updated pages that search engines adore.

Once that light bulb went on in the guru's head, the party was over. Spam blogs will soon take over real content blogs in number. A spam blog is a blog that is set-up to reproduce the content of many real blogs, via RSS feeds, based on keywords. To the reader with eyeballs, the blog has no value. The search engine spider, well, its hard to tell. In some cases the spammers are actually reproducing the exact content of well-read blogs.

Search engines will eventually choke on this new form of spam and will have to reconsider how they index and count it. When that happens the gurus will move on to something else but the effectiveness of RSS as a tool for real blogs may be damaged.

Okay, other than ranting about this, let me add. Don't buy or use software or programs that promise to create thousands of keyword rich pages for you with the push of a button. On the surface this may seem to have some appeal but it's cheating. And cheating is no way to build a business. If you are out to promote a thing and make a tiny bit of cash on the Internet, then those types of things may allow you to do so. But if you intend to build a business or a brand and actually create something of value, do it the old fashioned way.

Create good content, integrate your web site, blog and ezine newsletter, and keep at it month after month.