For those looking for authoritative content on topics of interest, these keyword-optimized ad, marketing and PR articles are kind of like aging Hollywood celebrities who look great from about a block away but up close are a mess. These articles start out seemingly useful, but quickly devolve into a cesspool of generic, useless, incomplete or even blatantly inaccurate information. Worse yet, the articles are often unreadable because they have not been written for humans, but for search engines like Google to pick up.

The sources for these articles vary. Certainly many are just written by folks with expertise in these areas, or by folks who like to write. But let’s face it: many of the articles originate from marketing, advertising and PR firms seeking to improve Google Search rankings related to client services, products and expertise. Have a client that sells antivirus software? Write a bunch of keyword-heavy articles on tips to keep viruses off your computer.

All of this can be great for driving traffic to client websites, but not so great for finding relevant search results on Google. As GigaOM neatly summarizes, the drumbeat of technology and web voices calling out this situation – and for change – grows louder. Vivek Wadhwa, director of research at the Center for Entrepreneurship and Research Commercialization at Duke University, is one such voice, recently noting in a TechCrunch blog post that Google has “become a jungle: a tropical paradise for spammers and marketers.”

None of this is lost on Google, which likely will see growing pressure from sites such as Facebook (pulling ad dollars) and Quora (a great Q&A site that turns to human experts rather than algorithms to provide answers and content). But to return to my initial point of how much of this low-quality content landing in search engine results can be traced back to advertising, marketing and PR firms. There is no denying this occurs, though how much is really attributable to PR firms remains hard to determine. I do think, as an industry, there is an obligation to at least acknowledge that the more this tactic is used of producing quick, low-quality, algorithm-rich content, the more its value to both producers and consumers of this content erodes.

Google may pursue its own strategy attacking this issue. From my perspective, the PR industry has steps it can take as well to disassociate high quality content it produces from the unending SEO-focused garbage content, including focusing more on the quality of the content destination. Rather than rely on the content farms that may rank high on Google now but could eventually be given the cold shoulder by the search engine, put more efforts in creating a high-quality content destination. Whether its a corporate blog or standalone site, authority will rise and risk will be mitigated to assume complete control of the content repository.