Site with content combined from various sources and all copy and pasted, but getting traffic

[illmasterj]

There's a site I've found that seems to have a simple strategy; they just copy portions of articles on other sites and cobble them together into a barely coherent article.

It has over 40k pages indexed.

I assumed this stuff was dead (but obviously haven't been looking hard enough). How is this still happening?

 

[Ryuzaki]

Google tries to combat this problem by detecting duplicate "syndicated" content and applying an automatic canonical to the original source. The original is not always the original, sadly, but the most authoritative. So there's "content jacking" that's being done still, too.

In the case you're describing, I suspect they can't auto-canonicalize anything since it's cobbled together from many sources.

There's all kinds of crap that still works on the non-link side.

The good thing is it's hard to monetize. Many if not most affiliate networks and ad networks will reject these types of sites after doing their own checks.

Of course if you're already in the networks and they don't check your 2nd, 3rd, or 50th site you've brought into the network, you can get away with it. But those networks, again, aren't very lucrative. So it becomes another cruddy spam "numbers game" where you're spraying and praying.

 

[tomer]

Was there any product review type content on the site in question?

 

[illmasterj]

It seems to mostly be info content that they are using.