Conversion Matters

I’m never really sure what to write about these days, so I figured it was about time I checked my logs to see what people were looking for, I mean hell, it’s what the gurus suggest (damn I was looking for a relevant link but couldn’t find one; still I’m sure that’s what they suggest)!

What the hell is a madlib site?

Madlib, or mad libs as Wikipedia refers to it, was a children’s game where you had to come up with alternative words and then fill in blanks in a story. Something like that anyway, I’ve never played it, I’m not American.

How does this relate to a website? The idea is usually implemented in such a way that one can spin large amounts of legible, legitimate (? - we’ll get to that later) content from a small amount of content.

So for example, the title of this post is ‘Are Madlib Sites Whitehat?’. If you wanted to ‘madlibify’ that title you may come up with something like this:

Are (Madlib|Mad Lib|Mad-Lib) (Sites|Websites|Blogs) (Whitehat|Blackhat|Grayhat|Illegal|Legitimate)?

1. Are Madlib Blogs Whitehat?
2. Are Mad Lib Websites Illegal?
etc.

Now you could fire this through your madlib function and you have a load of unique titles for a small amount of input.

Take this idea further, and you can see how it could be used to create 100 blog posts instead of 1 blog post. Or alternatively, let’s say you have a massive database driven website, you might ‘madlibify’ what would otherwise be static portions of each page to hopefully get more pages indexed.

Madlib sites are almost certainly not whitehat

Nearly every method of content creation that involves some kind of automation is pushing or breaking the limits of what search engines consider to be legitimate, whitehat content.

I think it’s a pretty safe bet to assume that if a search engine engineer came across a blog of yours with 100 very similar posts they would nuke it regardless of how unique/readable/whatever the content was.

Depending on your goals, it may be a fine option, makes a change from the usual scraping at least.

If you are genuinly interested in a fully fledged system involving madlibbing/content creation/automatic posting/blog farms etc I’d take a look at datapresser.