Eat White Sugar, Dummies!

White sugar

We've lost count of how many times our researchers have run across lousy answers at eHow.com. We're pretty certain it's over a thousand, because we have a huge backlog of DotD candidates with URLs in that domain and the Leaf Group's niche sites to which they're being moved. Most of the time the answers suffer from the eHowian's lack of knowledge, but today we'll feature an example of an interesting class of answers: the more or less correct answer to the wrong question. Freelancer Stacy Zogheib's take on the question "What Chemicals Does White Sugar Have?" is a case in point. Rather than providing the simple answer – because it's only one word, and therefore wouldn't meet the site's minimum word count – Stacy wrote a detailed discussion of the process of making white sugar... oops.

Take a Dump, Dummy!

Group photo of Seekyt staff, perhaps?

After Google slapped 'em upside the head with the digital can of whupass known as the Panda Update, many of the lamer content farms – Lunch, Helium, AssociatedContent, etc. – quietly faded into the good night known as the Internet Archive. The staff of the Antisocial Network are dedicated fans of their Wayback Machine, in case you didn't know (they even donate during the annual fund drive). A few escaped the carnage (eHow) and one or two still function today (Suite,¹ InfoBarrel²) at a greatly reduced level of activity. Seekyt's one of the latter, but something odd seems to be going on at that site: apparently, they're rewriting the site's more... worthless content, apparently in an attempt to get back on the board. We ran across some truly shitty content there last year, but recently found an updated (though still worthless) version. Originally titled "How to get free motions? Some advice for staying fit and healthy" by Rakhi143, Seekyt's crack staff have rewritten the article and added new title: "How to Have Regular Bowel Movements and Relax."

Gibberish for Dummies (Seekyt Week 3)

Gastrointestinal tract

What kind of internet content would be worse than advertising disguised as (bad) advice? We asked ourselves that question quite some time ago and weren't really sure there was something worse. At least not until we ran into some Seekyt garbage called "How to get free motions? Some advice for staying fit and healthy," posted by a member calling himself rakhi143 (we call him Rakhi). After we read that one, we were pretty sure that gibberish written only for the purposes of self-promotion is just a little worse.

Why self-promotion? Because Rakhi has four links with his Seekyt referral code in the post, and a quick survey of his profile shows that he uses the same first paragraph – with three referral links – for every post. We might have let him get away with that sort of bullshit if his content were... coherent. But it's not. Take a gander at this hot mess:

Thoughts about Zymurgy, Dummy Style

There’s a possibility that no branch of science suffers more at the hands of self-appointed freelancers than nutrition. Every darned fad diet that comes down the pike is the subject of thousands of glowing blog posts, each carefully tailored to suck in eyeballs. Never mind that three months later, the same "nutrition" or "fitness" blogger will be posting another glowing review of a different fad diet…

Those freelancers also hit the pay-for-hits sites, too. Here’s a little piece of rubbish published by someone who calls himself Emge over at DailyTwoCents, an article on “Benefits of Drinking Beer.”¹ We’ll forgive the writer for the spelling and grammatical mistakes since English is not his first language, but we won't forgive the misinformation: