This article has been in the making for 20 years.

We coined the term, “Rubber Boot Theory” 2 decades ago and have been using it ever since.

It is more prevalent now than ever before because of AI.

What is the rubber boot theory?

It is an idea in internet marketing.

Imagine you are shark fishing on a huge boat.  Now imagine that you don’t have any proper shark bait, but instead, you have millions of rubber boots with you, and millions of fishing lines with hooks.

If you used a rubber boot as shark bait on the end of each fishing line, maybe you’d catch a couple of super hungry sharks, who were so starving that they’d eat anything, even literally a rubber boot.

It is supposed to be a humorous metaphor to describe the idea of posting a ton of low quality articles on your website.

Yes, each one of your articles stink.  

But if you had millions of articles, then maybe someone would stumble across one of them on an obscure long tail keyword.

Fast forward to the age of AI.  Now, people are able to post millions (literally) of low quality articles with a couple of clicks.

Google hates this (as they should) and they will mark it as spam.

From their article:

“Scaled content abuse

We’ve long had a policy against using automation to generate low-quality or unoriginal content at scale with the goal of manipulating search rankings. This policy was originally designed to address instances of content being generated at scale where it was clear that automation was involved.“

Google calls this garbage “scaled content”.  

I think that’s because they didn’t have the fun terminology of the “rubber boot theory” to go off of.

The point is that now you need to be extra careful when producing mountains of AI generated content.  

Write articles for people that have some unique insights.  That is your only option for long term sustainability.

If you are using the rubber boot theory to drive traffic, you can expect the Google shark monster to tip over your whole boat at some point.