When articles can be bought for the price of a medium picture on istock, not only is the quality deplorable, but more often than not writers will be tempted to plagiarize. And that’s only applicable to “reputable” sites who actually pay for content. I know a lot of sites who don’t and instead abuse the copy and paste functions. There’s only so much that can be said on certain subjects so the temptation to cut corners is strong.

In my truest opinion, Google should penalize sites whose goals are not to provide quality information. After all, when you’re using Google for answers, quality should be king.

I’m also sick of following a link only to land on an aggregator before getting the real article. It wastes my time, bandwidth and diminishes my perception of Google’s algorythm. Aggregators should get their visitors through Twitter (if you want to follow them), RSS feeds and such… not through Google.

Great thought Collis. I wish you had more time to publish these articles on the Netsetter.

I really enjoyed the comparison between some of the big names in the industry – with each other and with one of your own.

With the abundance of new articles to read every day (shared on Twitter, Facebook, Email, etc.), I’m finding it more and more difficult to filter out the “quantity” and focus on the “quality”.

Once a website has turned me off with too many “quantity” posts, I’m likely to be gone forever.

While quantity may be winning the battle right now I think ultimately quality will win the war.

Personally I will skip over About.com in a search result simply because time and time again I have found there content to not be very in depth as what I am searching for.

On the other hand I love Wikipedia because there are many instances where I will come across something that I know nothing about. I don’t need to know everything about it just a little information. For this Wikipedia is perfect.

All types of content have their place on the web. That is what makes up the web. The freedom the post anything and as much of it as you want.

As blogging becomes more popular and people more internet savvy. I think sites will rely less and less on search engines to bring traffic. The majority of the sites I visit regularly are from an RSS reader. Most of these found there way to my reader via a link from another site on my reader. I have found and subscribe to more sites this way that provide quality content than I would ever have found with a search engine alone.(including PSDTuts).

The age old problem of quality vs quantity, as you said, is probably the dilemma faced by every web publisher, especially those starting now.

I guess the way to go, if you are just starting off, is to have more mass-oriented content at the beginning and gradually move to high quality once you have the user base.

This is probably why we likely won’t see the end of the list post this decade.

We all love you for it.

This is on aspect that is certain in the later category. The idea that articles are automatically guided towards the most profitable “ad words” sends shivers down my spine, though I guess it was an inevitable evolution of all the tools we have available to evaluate traffic.

As you’ve proven with the Tuts network of sites, quality is still appreciated. It certainly is better to have less quality content than a large mass of junk.