What Does Barbie, the Statue of Liberty and Maine Have in Common?

There are a lot of sites out there, I suppose that are similar to mine, that write about trending news and other hot topics and it seems like most of them just go to Google Hot Trends, see what’s popular and then write a random story about it, not knowing why the topic is trending.

As long as these sites put out quality content, it’s all fine and dandy, but most of them are just spammer sites trying to make a buck on adsense and the content is crap. I’m not going to “out” any of these sites, but I’m going to provide examples of some recent trends I’m seeing sites talk about without any idea of why.

Trends from the past 12 hours:

• statue of liberty
• sunday school barbie
• french maid barbie
• google corporate logo
• how much do lungs weigh
• maine
• 1999 time magazine person of the century
• which job is held by more americans
• forbes most valuable sports franchises 2010

If you watched Million Dollar Money Drop last night, you’ll know where all of these trends come from. They were all parts of questions asked to the contestants.

One question for example was something along the lines of “What Barbie does Mattel not sell?” and the choices were Sunday School Barbie, French Maid Barbie and Lingerie Barbie. Now if one of those hot trends sites sees these terms and writes about it, do you think they will make any money from their visitors? No, probably not because the people who were interested were only interested on the night the game show aired, and they probably didn’t answer the question anyway.

I think the real reason I’m writing this is because I hate it when I visit a site to read about something I just saw on the news or on Facebook, etc. and come to one of those Hot Trends scraper sites that post a paragraph of useless text only slightly related to the topic and in almost completely broken English. Just something that’s been on my mind…