Buddha - 12:44 am on Mar 25, 2005 (gmt 0)

I posted about this issue last year and gave my thesis about G's competitive strategy. It seems that everyone else is starting to see this as an issue now.

[webmasterworld.com...]

While I agree that scraper sites do not make for good serps, as an advertiser, I think the click is as qualified as any other search traffic. And I'm pretty sure google has the data to back this up.

Even though a scraper site may look like crap, the visitor still typed a query in a search engine, clicked the listing, saw a relevant ad, and clicked the ad. Many times the landing pg of the ad is more targetted than pg listed on the SE.

For the most part, the quality of SE traffic is the same whether it goes through a content middleman or a scraper middleman to the advertiser.