The Wall Street Journal is at it again. Earlier in the week Jason Fry speculated on the fate of blogging. Today Lee Gomes delves into the mysterious world of Internet entrepreneurs and their obsession with SEO (search-engine optimization), or spamming, as some prefer to call it.

The central point of the article is that “original content” in many websites is really junk copy churned out by sweatshop writers who are paid peanuts to produce highly-targeted pieces. The purpose is to bait Google with hooks laden with keywords. The resulting traffic then dutifully clicks on the contextual ads making money for the owner. Repeat this process hundreds of times and you have a lucrative business which largely runs itself.

These “content creches”, as I’ve called them, exist all over the Internet. They’re not new. Back in the 1990s “entrepreneurs” used static websites to accomplish the same thing. Now blog platforms are used because of the ease with which they can be updated.

In the interests of scientific inquiry, Lee gets out of his executive chair at WSJ and trundles over to backstreet Webtown looking for “writing” work.

Well, if you haven’t done this yourself, you’ll enjoy this article. If you’ve ever tried “bidding on projects” at one of the online word brokers, you may not want to be reminded of the process.

Yours truly has stepped out on this trail in the past. One job offered $250 a month to write six financial posts a week. No guidance was given or sources recommended. Churned copy was fine, so long as the piece banged on about mortgages, factoring, credit cards etc. As a full-time professional writer I found it impossible to do this, so pulled out before I even started.

So, how did Lee fare?

I managed to get underbid on numerous jobs before snaring one from a Web entrepreneur I would come to know as “Whirlywinds.” I would have to write 50 articles, each 500 words long. Topics to be assigned. Pay: $100. For everything.

My first assignment came a few days later. “The topic would be ‘colloidal silver,’ ” Whirlywinds informed me. But then he added a caveat: “Please EXCLUDE any negative comments, as I sell this product online.”

Colloidal silver is one of those bits of medical quackery that thrive on the unregulated Web. I told Whirlywinds I’d rather pass.

That captures the essence of the trade perfectly. It’s the mass production end of the process: more Henry Ford than Mr Rolls and Mr Royce.

Content creches, like anything else, can be good or bad or indeterminate. At the high-end of the business there are some excellent information publications. I have around 15 myself. One of my most popular is Royal Anecdotes which chases news about Royalty from a slightly cheeky angle. So successful is it that it’s spawned Aristocracy Anecdotes – Amusing Tales of Toffs Past and Present.

The key feature of the better content creches is that the writer enjoys the process, deals honestly with readers, and provides value for the clicks which pay the bills. It helps if the writer owns the permalinks too.

Back to Lee: “My job, it became clear, was to make enough small changes to the text for Whirlywinds to be able to pass it off to search engines as his own. Which is, in fact, what most of the ‘original content’ on these sites turns out to be: cut-and-paste jobs with superficial modifications. At $2 an article, tops, that’s all anyone can afford to provide — even in India and Eastern Europe, where most of this work gets done. My conscientiousness with the first piece was, in retrospect, comical.”

But then he zeroes-in on the main “culprits”: “My beef, actually, is with the search engines and the economics of the modern Web. Google, for example, says its mission is ‘to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.’ The way that’s written, one thinks perhaps of a satellite orbiting high above the earth, capturing all its information but interfering with nothing.”

Content creches are an occult compact between Google (mostly) and the “entrepreneurs” who deliver the content and clicks which enrich both sides in the equation.

It can be done well, though. And that’s the task of real writers like Lee Gomes and others. Content creches shouldn’t just be written off as downmarket rags swindling the world of its money. The Wall Street Journal is, after all, a content creche in print, put together for its advertisers to drape their wares around the information.

Where’s the difference? The WSJ makes good copy, that’s all.