Google is the biggest scraping site in the world

[whatson]

So ironically, or hypocritically Google want to stop sites scraping content (not that they have managed to achieve this in their latest attempt). Yet, they must be the biggest scrapers of them all.
The example thrown around before was "eiffel tower height", you do the search and above all the serps is google's answer taken from other sites.
Even searching "how tall is brad pitt" will yield the same method. Not to mention their define: searches, e.g. [google.co.nz ]

So it is do as we "say" not as we do for them. Let's just hope this doesn't also correspond to their mantra of "don't be evil".

[TheMadScientist]

LMAO! Yeah, unfortunately, that seems to be what we have to deal with, and their view on auto-generated content is: It's not all bad, EG their search results ... They're good, and they don't allow them to be crawled, so it's ok! lol

It's definitely contradictory, but, again, it's what we have to deal with and compete with for rankings, and, imo, it's going to get worse, not better ... I definitely recommend finding other traffic avenues.

[ErnestHemingway]

@whatson

This is nothing, I highly suggest that we all find different avenues for traffic as suggested by MadScientist. Not sure what I would recommend but G is certainly trying to get every piece of the pie. We are not far from the day when they will put an ajax box that will give answer to the query.

They want users to stay on their site just like Facebook and Twitter.

[Reno]

I highly suggest that we all find different avenues for traffic

And I hope we can kick around some ideas here, especially those that are not so obvious.

One of the things I'm doing is taking a slightly different slant on things. My sites were butchered by Panda, so my daily traffic numbers are down by half. So I'm trying to forget about Google for awhile and instead I am taking a look at my historical sales to visitors ratio, and how can I improve that, even if my visitor count stays down for awhile.

So for example, let's say I was averaging 1 sale per 100 visitors, and that has held steady for some time. OK, my visitor count is down, so can I push that ratio to 1 sale per 80 visitors. If I can, then for every 400 visitors I'll be getting 5 sales instead of 4.

That's not a huge improvement, but if I can do it, then Google is out of the loop, and if they ever restore me to good graces, I'll be that much better off.

....................

[craigpet]

How about using peer to peer search engines or decentralized search engines. There are a couple of them out there.