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Notes -
Pre-AI slop was actually good - and AI ruined it
I've seen many claims that "Slop existed before AI" and that means AI isn't destroying the internet. I believe that is absolutely false. The OG slop was actually good, and now it's gone.
Let's define exactly what we're talking about. The slop is web content created by marketing teams, at the absolute lowest cost possible, in order to improve search engine ranking. Let's look at a specific example: when looking up a term mentioned in another post I came across slop created by the same company and same marketing team, but years apart. Let's see if you can tell which slop is worthless garbage ruined by AI, and which is slop that despite being slop may actually be slightly useful.
link
link
Both of these articles were created with the exact same intention: to enhance search engine ranking at the lowest cost possible. Yet one of them makes the internet a better place, and the other one ruins it. I might even contend that when a human is tasked with writing worthless fluff, that human can't help but to try to insert some nuggets of truth into that fluff. It's simply human nature. AI has no such compulsion.
This is obviously not true though. Yes it's interesting that these are same company, same topic, but the early example is very clearly not some low effort, low cost article. It quotes actual people ffs!
I have worked in marketing for a number of years, and produced a good deal of SEO slop. I'm sure I'm not the only person here with the same experience either. I daresay that every single person in such a position will say the same thing: gathering quotes, even internal quotes, is a ballache, and immediately adds a bunch of extra time needed to any given project. The Medium article has multiple dozen quotes. It is like the highest effort piece of SEO work you will ever see.
edit: I figure I should provide an actual example of SEO slop. Here's a topic I actually remember publishing on once (not this specific article, just the search term)
https://www.integrate.io/blog/7-key-differences-between-data-lakes-vs-data-warehouses/
Data lakes vs data warehouses. A simple enough technical question that a lot of B2B data companies would compete for. This is a very standard SEO article: it's got a nice list hook in the title; Good number of links, both internal and external; Couple of CTAs; etc. etc.. And it's all pretty low effort: no custom design work, no diagrams, just the 1 stock cover image; no quotes, no insight; it's just a very standard presentation of the basics on this topic.
I'm sure they put together a scalable and low cost way of doing this. For example, they mention a newsletter, it may send out requests for opinion regularly, and subscribers can send in their hot takes via a form. Then they can simply cherry pick a bunch of halfway decent responses, write 1 paragraph of exposition, and have an article in less effort than it takes to manually write one.
If you look at the other articles on that page, it's clear they're not in the business of putting a lot of effort into each article.
Low cost in the sense that they aren't literally paying the participants for their quotes, sure. But low cost in the sense that the marketer does not need to expend a lot of salaried time? No way. Just the lead time for gathering everything would add months to the timeline, whereas a typical SEO blog is going from brief to publish in under a week.
Like the other articles on the page you mention, these are so much more typical of what SEO blogging actually was:
3 Reasons Why Going To Law School Has Become Popular Again
10 Ways To Make A Case For Yourself As A Lawyer
4 Tips To A Successful Maternity Leave While Having A Solo Practice
The latter 2 actually go the extra step of having some custom work with infographics, so slightly higher effort, but these are clearly written as very standard SEO articles. There is nothing remotely interesting in them in terms of content or style, and nothing to distinguish them from a typical AI written blog
I would have to disagree with you there. They lack the "We have optimized this article using high-ranking keywords ... to ensure it not only provides unmatched value but also performs strongly in search engine rankings." part
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