I stopped by GSC the other day to check on Who Links To You ... and was staggered to find vast numbers of links from a pair of sites I'd never heard of, from one of those spam-friendly pacific island tld's. A quick look at the thumbnail made everything plain: both sites had swiped the design, title and images of a legitimate site that happens to include links to mine. (It's the kind where each discussion-thread post includes a link to your website, so there are heaps of them, presumably all no-followed, but useful to humans.) They'd changed all the text--at least the headlines visible in the thumbnail--to something spammy and revolting,* so it wasn't a direct DNS swap.
Delving deeper into GSC yielded a long list of real-site paths tacked onto offending-site's domain name, meaning they'd scraped the whole thing, not just the front page. Still deeper delving revealed that both offending sites live at CloudFlare, making further investigation a dead end.
Naturally I sent a heads-up to the real site, but I remain puzzled: What's in it for the scraper?
* What you consider revolting is, of course, a matter of individual taste. But I'm confident that the victim site will be as disgusted as I was.
