Push Button Websites

Does scraping content still work?

[migumbo]

There's plenty of software doing the rounds that can churn out thousands of pages in a matter of minutes.
Is this still working for people, or have the search engines switched on to it in recent times?

[larryhatch]

Migumbo:

I very strongly suspect that the search engines are very well aware of such abuses.
It wouldn't take much to find auto-generated pages, a few tweeks of their duplicate contents filters.

It would be very much in the interests of G and Y and MSN to filter out junk like this,
and eventually, suicidal not to.

Don't expect anyone selling push-button-site-generators to tell you this though. -Larry

[howiejs]

The issue is footprints . .

If you can modify the template over the tool you are 50% there . . .

[trillianjedi]

Footprints

I absolutely think that is the case. SE's will look for patterns.

If you can modify the template over the tool you are 50% there

Or build your own tool.

TJ

[Iguana]

Autogenerated websites did very well in 2003 and ok in 2004. I seem to see less and less in the actual SERPS - it's only when I go examining my backlinks that I find them.

But even back then, they all piggybacked (pages were added to the original site or were placed on new sites linked to by the original site) on sites with good PR (e.g. PR7). Without that high PR seeding, all those thousands of pages wouldn't even get indexed fully.

[willybfriendly]

From what I have seen, G has become much better at filtering out scraper sites. Y...well, I haven't figured out what is going on with Y for a month or so. Very poor results overall, and scraping can get a #1 on a moderately competitive term.

WBF

[migumbo]

Yeah, it seems like if you can change a template to make it look like something different then it still seems to work. I made a script that adds a little bit of fresh (and relevant content) to each page dynamically and it still seems to get a bit of traffic.
I just wonder how long it can last for, surely the SE's have to get rid of *rubbish content* like this somehow? The only way I can think of his human editing results?