Last week I met with a local investor to discuss RealSelf.com and the consumer pain points we address. I explained to him our core belief that consumers yearn for authenticity in the personal beauty market. 

Offline the consumer is tiring of countless quick fix claims and promises of great results from companies ranging from schlocky late hour infomercial purveyors of anti-wrinkle creams to big product goods firms that can't resist the fat margins and huge demand for self-improvement products.  Online it's spamville.  One come- on after another and a bottomless pit of SEO-geared content, there simply to trick Google into believing they add relevance to people's lives.

Spam motivates me to work harder and smarter. How so? Here's just one example based on a project currently posted at elance.com, a place to find freelancers.  The project description, emphasis added (can't resist the irony):

This is for 132 breast enhancement related articles. The primary focus will be SEO and getting visitors to our website. The articles need to be at least 500 words each. They are for breast enhancement review website, breastenhancementguides.com. Please don't add any info from our company in the articles, or have them mention our company. I will add that information once I get the articles. Our website is for natural breast enhancement. Please target the keywords below. The articles will need to be different, even though some keywords are very similar subject matters. They really need to be unique, or the article websites won't accept them. Don't use the same transitions or attention getters for every article. They all must be UNIQUE. This is very important. Each article will target its own keyword. The keywords are attached in Word format. I would like this done as soon as possible.

The word document then presents dozens and dozens of breast-related keywords.  Can't imagine this effort would have a good ROI, but in the long-tail search world its bound to pull in some unsuspecting soul to a site that promotes, among other dubious products, a breast enhancement gum.  Yes, you read that correctly.  Gum to grow larger breasts.

I've only posted a handful of times to article websites simply because of the kind of neighborhood it places our site reputation.  Rather spend time beating spammers by generating truly organic content by site members (e.g. cosmetic treatment reviews) and our network of professionals that help people get answers.