Forum Moderators: martinibuster
Today I sat down and did an extensive amount of 'scraped content' research for my site just to see how well the search engines (Google, Yahoo, MSN) were doing with MFA sites and to my shock and amazement most of the AdSense scrapers that I had been tracking months ago were no longer visible and my results came up almost pristine.
Upon closer inspection the scaper sites were still present, they still had AdSense on them, but they were rarely in the SERPs, other than supplemental if at all, for about 50 scraping test checkpoints.
The real upside which almost knocked me over with a feather was a bunch of these scrapers had Page Rank ZERO which is awesome that they're 'per situs non gratis' ;)
My initial conclusions were:
1. Being an authoritative site at the top of the food chain seems to help toss everyone else into supplemental results
2. Duplicate content granularity seems to be possibly extremely narrow, perhaps detectable down to a paragraph or even sentence level but it's pure speculation at this time
3. Yahoo and MSN showed the most scraped content, but they seemed much tighter than usual with only 1 or 2 bogus listings opposed to previous tests many months ago with page after page of scrapings
Final thoughts:
Going to do some creative research later as I think the scrapers may be adapting to the new landscape and altering a few words here or there in the content to avoid the duplicate penalties.
Interested in feedback from others that have been scraped/
It is always a game of catchup though - the more the engines crack down, the more sophisticated the scrapers become.
good effort incrediBILL, thanks for sharing the results, but they will remain in business as long as they can buy traffic, natural traffic is rarely formulated into their business model because its unpredictable, unsustainable and costly due to lack of original content and the magnitude of sites run by each of those 'publishers'.
The cruddiest search engine for my keywords was MSN last time I looked. Pages upon pages of crap sites. All has changed over the last couple of weeks. I'm top 3 on msn UK, with several other entries in the top two pages, and from nowhere on msn.com to second page, along with several other entries on the second page. I'm normally top 3 on Google uk and .com, so it's good to see msn have found me at last.
Now if they'd only stop them advertising with adwords as well
That would be a nail I would like to see in their coffin!
As far as dupilicate content goes, I'm still seeing an alarming amount of it ranking, especially in Yahoo via spammy copy and paste "news" blogs. MSN seems to be getting out duplicate content a little better but is still, IMO, very susceptible to paid links, links from scrapers, and links from huge autogenerated sites.
I help a family member who has a huge informational site with no advertising about a certain cancer keyword that was always having trouble with scraped content. Scrapers have been constantly popping up in the SERPS with her writing for the past few years. As of a few months back, they are popping up less and getting evicted from the results much quicker. I have been testing a few scraper killers but I'm fairly sure at least part of it is due to improvements at each SE. ;-)
The question is, why are the sites still allowed to run adsense?
