I've gotten more than a little concerned lately over a trend I see in the SEO world. I've noticed through following the backlink acquisition of several client sites that the better a site ranks (for a wide variety of phrases), the more spam/scraper sites will re-publish your text or site description from the SERPs and link to you. A thread on the subject of bad neighborhoods linking to sites is active at HighRankings today. That thread notes dangers on both sides of the issue:
#1 - Your site could become targeted by so many scrapers and spammy sites that they overwhelm your legitimate links and make it appear that your site is primarily in "bad neighborhoods".
#2 - On the flip side, sites' link popularity will be boosted so highly from all these links (even with very low value) that they'll remain perpetually in the top rankings, despite becoming irrellevant over time.
The thorniness comes from the massive difficulty in tracking, tagging and removing the value (positive or negative) from millions of URLs. The search engines have a daunting task ahead to stay a step ahead of the more clever scrape & re-publish software and errors on either side could cause big problems in the SERPs.
For an example, note this linkdomain search, showing 15,000+ links (you can actually browse to page 99 and see that there really are that many). Since, in the last 6 months, the site (a client of ours) has only gotten referral traffic from about 2,000 URLs, I can assume that at least 7,500 (half), if not many more, are simply scrapers. That's a very, very high percentage of links that are "bad neighborhoods". I have to wonder how effectively this can be combatted...
If you've got experience with scrapers or "neighborhoods" damaging sites, please let us know below. The more evidence, the better.
I am very surprised that Google is not eliminating these sites or sending them pub service ads. They can not be good value for advertisers.
I don't think Google actually cares what sort of value the adsense advertisers are getting as long as the ads are clicked on. The thing that may make them care were if that clicking were to stop...
We are getting traffic from some porn site like erot.co i am confused why and who are making links on their sites
Most of my sites are suffering from scraper sites, i.e. my content has been stolen and shows up on all these AdSens sites so they can make a quick buck showing Googl ads. To get traffic they steal your content and dis[plays it on their site. IF they have a link to your site then it is almost always a rel=nofollow link. IF Google would care, then they could make these sites disappear just by not allowing them to have their google ads on their sites. You can report the sites to Google, which I have done a lot of times, BUT it doesn't help at all. Nothing happens at all even if the violate everything in Googles policies. So I guess we just have to live with it, right? Another thing what I have started doing is to use the Ad filter to remove spam sites that use AdWords to get visitors and then AdSense to get click..... but not from me :)
The sites which i've seen pick up tons of scraper links in comparison to their number of natural links seem to be suffering from lags in ranking which I don't beleive they would otherwise have (non-sandboxed).
Not only does it just create a generally sketchy looking backlink landscape it also screws with your inbound anchor percentages; regardless of any SE being able to weed those out it renders the webmaster unable to analyze that data in terms of anchor density from "real" links.
Some industries are more prone to it than others, what a headache for the link dev.
I'd guess that google is making a lot of money off of adwords on the scraper sites. Otherwise they might develop filters that would eliminate them.
I am amazed at the relative number of backlink(inbound links) relative to substitive links.
This is from the MSN interview at https://www.seomoz.org/articles/community-questions-to-msn-search.php... it seems relevant here...
Rand: Is it possible to hurt a site’s rankings by pointing too many links to it too quickly or by pointing too many low quality links at it? Is there concern that these techniques could be used maliciously against a legitimate site?
MSN: A good analogy here is you want to play in good neighborhoods. If you have a lot of spam sites point to your page then, well, your page starts to look like spam. On the other hand, if you are endorsed by many high quality sites then there is a good chance that your site is also high quality.
Scraper sites often use the search results to find sites to scrape. So with a good position you are more often scraped, but your competition in the Top10 should have the same problem.