SE spammers using blogs

[yo-yo]

My hard work contributes something back to the Internet. I provide something of inherent value to the user. I provide something the user wants to use in and of itself.

Just like I thought... the hard worker despises those who make more than him without working hard

what spammers do is unethical, immoral and sometimes illegal (e.g. copyright infringment).

I almost cried that was such a sad story. Unethical, immoral? PLEASE. Since when does Google or a few snobby webmasters decide what is ethical and moral? You have some nerve...

The real problem is...

The real problem is people like you who are always judging and putting down others you disagree with.

[chromate]

Sounds to me like you're just trying to convince yourself yo-yo.

Cloaking etc is one thing, but scraper sites are a completely different story. It's not "smart" to scrape content from other people's sites. Spammers using these techniques are simply profiting from other people's hard work. That's why they don't need to work hard, because they steal. End of story. It is theft and shouldn't be treated as anything less.

And besides the fact that spammers using these techniques are simply piggy-backing off of other people's hard work, who says that an ethical web publisher has to work so much harder than a spammer? There are many people, myself included, that have been earning a good income through very little work. In fact, last year I barely touched my sites at all. It was like a year long holiday. (Not something I'm proud of!) Recently, I've hardly done anything apart from pay for other people to write content for me.

So yeah, it's not like I'm working hard, but I still manage to create sites without spamming and stealing. Meanwhile I have to constantly search for spam sites that steal my content because they're too lazy or inept to produce their own.

[yo-yo]

It's not "smart" to scrape content from other people's sites. Spammers using these techniques are simply profiting from other people's hard work. ... It is theft and shouldn't be treated as anything less.

Really, so you're not complaining about Google listing your URL, title, and description - but you're worried about other sites doing it...

[chromate]

Think it through a bit - that's an awful comparison.

[KLB]

Really, so you're not complaining about Google listing your URL, title, and description - but you're worried about other sites doing it...

No I don't mind if people display a link to my pages with a very brief description of the page. In fact I encourage this by providing suggested link text and descriptions. What I take issue with is people who scrape large sections of my pages and then feed this to SEs via cloaking so that they can feed users advertising laden pages.

There is a difference between providing a directory site that links to other websites or creating a page of unique content that then references another site and scraping the content of someone else's website in an effort to create keyword rich pages that are fed to search engines. There is absolutly no comparison between how Google indexes websites and provides search results and how spammer's employ scraping to produce garbage pages full of advertising.

[yo-yo]

Think it through a bit - that's an awful comparison.

Is it?

The most famous scraping program (traffic equalizer for those of you under a rock) does what? IT SCRAPES SEARCH ENGINES. All they do is take the kw's and grab the top 10 results from google or yahoo, and list them on their pages.. just like yahoo or google do when you type the kw in.

So again... it's fine and dandy for google to come index your content, and get rich off displaying it on their site, but it's not ok for someone else to take that same description and url and use it for their site?

[KLB]

So again... it's fine and dandy for google to come index your content, and get rich off displaying it on their site, but it's not ok for someone else to take that same description and url and use it for their site?

Nice of you to completely ignore my post that expanded upon what Chromate said.

Once again: I don't think anybody has any problem with a site that is trying to be a search engine or directory and links to sites and provides descriptions of a similar length as Googles provided the site's bots obey the robots.txt file and all caching instructions. What we have problems with are sites that: employ bots that disobey the robots.txt file and caching instructions; scrape long sections of text (more than the brief descriptions provided by Google, Yahoo or MSN); hide the links to the site or only stick them into a page after a really long section of white space such that users think that the ads are the content of the page and the page contains nothing else.

[g1c9]

I honestly didnt read all 5 pages of replies before posting this, in fact I only read the first post.

Anyways, as I frequent black hat seo forums, trust me: few spammers get their adsense banned. The fact is google is a publicly traded corporation and they profit from the clicks... They need SE spammers.

[chromate]

They need SE spammers.

No, they don't. Ultimately if the Google SERPs are full of spam, users will eventually just search elsewhere.

[James]

It's like saying the world's economy needs terrorists because they blow stuff up and new things have to be made to replace those things. Very "Fifth Element's guy with the head shaved on one side with a plastic thing covering it"-esque idealism.

PS w00t 1500th post

[g1c9]

We'll they don't need them, but they do profit immensely from them.

[James]

I don't believe that Google actually keeps the money from fraudulent clicks.

If you're not talking about clicks, and are talking about people getting to the top of SE results from spamming then you're just plain wrong.

[Kadence]

I don't believe that Google actually keeps the money from fraudulent clicks.

Eh? Scraped content has little to do with fraudelent clicks. Anyone with any familiarity of the history of scraped SERP sites will tell you how great that kind of AdSense traffic is at converting. This is very targeted traffic.

Google isn't going to ban people for putting AdSense on scraped content sites, and there is little or virtually no correlation between shady scraping practices and fraudelent click practices.

There are many reasons for people to dislike these kinds of sites and for Google to ban them, but the actual clicks generally tend to be high quality.

[KLB]

Eh? Scraped content has little to do with fraudelent clicks. Anyone with any familiarity of the history of scraped SERP sites will tell you how great that kind of AdSense traffic is at converting. This is very targeted traffic.

Google isn't going to ban people for putting AdSense on scraped content sites, and there is little or virtually no correlation between shady scraping practices and fraudelent click practices.

There are many reasons for people to dislike these kinds of sites and for Google to ban them, but the actual clicks generally tend to be high quality.

I tend to agree with these obserations. Scrapped content does not in and of itself lead to fraudlent clicks. By tolerating scraper sites, however, Google is earning profits from blatent copyright infringements.

I've seen an up tick in instances of my content being stolen by scraper sites that use cloaking to hide their activity. The problem is I'm not sure how to address these issues nor am I sure how we could get Google to lower the hammer on scrapper sites as they have a serious conflict of interest in regards to taking actions against such tactics.