| Scraper Sites in the Online Ecosystem |
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Written by Ray Campbell October 23, 2006 AdWords Arbitrage [Re: "How AdWords Arbitrage Works," LED Digest 2270] Arbitrage and scraper sites are two different things. Arbitrage exists in all economic markets, and will exist in online economic markets, whether we like it or not. If Microsoft sells the same keyword way cheaper than Google or Yahoo, someone will buy it on Microsoft and and "sell" it on Google ad or Yahoo YPN pages. If PPC long tail terms are way cheap compared to the revenue that can be gained by sending searchers for those terms to affiliate sites, someone is going to buy those terms and send them to an affiliate sites. It tends to be a PPC phenomenon, since PPC can be turned on and off instantaneously, but if the imbalance is long lived enough you will see it in organic as well. The sites created to collect this revenue may or may not be terrible sites, and may or may not be a burden on the internet. It's just the market at work, and like all markets it can lead to good or bad things. Scraper sites are quite different. Scraper sites are autogenerated mishmashes where content is pulled from other folks' sites or search results, and served back up to the Google spiders. Generally, the folks running these sites point a bunch of links at them (many spammed into forums or blog comments) to give them some weight with Google. As a general rule, they make their money from Google ads. The amazing thing is that Google doesn't shut these down, because it ruins their SERPS. On the other hand, they make a bunch of money off them when people click on the ads. It's not clear to me that Google wants to shut them down. Kim Malone, who runs the Google ad business, had an interview on WebmasterRadio.fm. Pushed on the issue, she said (and I'm paraphrasing) that scraper sites were legitimate parts of the online 'ecosystem.' She certainly did not say, "We are hunting them down and killing them as fast as we can." I suppose so long as Google sees them as part of the ecosystem, we can just expect to keep seeing sites, scraping our content, serving it back up to Google, and Google passing it along while taking a share of the revenue. Ray Campbell Comments (0)
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