Generated Content Pros And Cons
Content generators are becoming more effective and widespread as technology improves. This software can create entire articles based off of a few key terms. Improvements in this type of software is resulting in articles that are readable and composed of legitimate source material. This technology has its pros and cons as the overall content continues to improve.
Pros
A Useful Research Tool: content generators pull their data sets from existing works, public articles, online encyclopedias, and publicly searchable content. You can generate an article simply for the source material it provides to save on research time.
Quick Turnaround For General Information: some articles simply by their content are not very deep. For example, an article about changing the oil in a Jeep doesn’t require much more than repeated steps from the owner’s manual. Generated content can be useful for information that is generalized.
Good For Broad Overviews: many articles are simply general overviews of a topic or subject matter. They don’t into much detail or author insight and serve mainly to inform of general facts. A generated article can easily group broadly researched knowledge into a readable article.
Idea Generation Tool: while a generated article may not be what you’re looking for it can give you a good starting point. Generalized facts or figures can be interpreted in innovative and new ways.
Cons
Lack of Authenticity: a computer generated article will never be as authentic as the real thing. It lacks the emotion and authenticity a person brings to written work by drawing on such things as personal events or passion about a topic.
Unawareness Of Current Trend Or Events: the world changes very fast and a computer-based generation tool will not be aware of wider trends, current events, or what is happening online at that moment.
Spam: when using a content generator to create articles it is possible to create too much material. An overabundance of nonspecific generalized articles will greatly reduce reader interest and be interpreted as spam.
Search Engines Are A Bit Too Smart: keywords are not nearly important as they used to be and a technically sound but bland article will not rank high just because it has the right keywords in it.
Blandness: generated articles are still not as good as those written by people. An article generator does not understand humor, puns, similes, metaphors, or drawing from history or popular culture.
How Search Engines Will Respond
A key point noted above is how search engines will react to automatically generated content. This may be the most notable flaw of such content and one that severely limits its usefulness. In the early days of the internet search engines were quite primitive and worked chiefly off of keywords. This lead to keyword stuffing to improve an article’s position on search results. One of the more inventive ideas of the time was to encode keywords into the background of a website.
These days search engines are far more advanced measuring an article’s rank on its content, what reader can learn from it, or how useful said content is. An automatically generated article will lack that human touch and may not be ranked as high as an article you would write yourself.
Final Thoughts
Generated content programs do have their place in the marketing world. However, it would prove foolish to rely entirely on such a system for all your content generation. The need for creative, personalized, and above useful writing isn’t going away. Plus improving search engines will easily bury such information far into search results limiting its overall usefulness.
As a professional, you certainly take pride in what you do. Nobody involved in a creative endeavor wants to be remembered for mediocre forgettable work. Your work should reflect your own unique talents and creative capabilities. We recommend you read the “The Purple Cow” to learn more about not only being unique but also presenting value to your customers.