Should scrapers be banned for life?
Their presence makes the whole browsing experience worse, and ultimately reduces the number of clicks on ads. If you did a search on widgets, and clicked on a couple of the ads only to find that what you thought would lead to a useful sites were scrapers, you'd stop clicking the ads. I no longer click ads in search because I know most of them are useless scrapers.Diabetes supplementsPioneer Report GRMLfree Xanga music codesfree Xanga skins(Live Journal) icons
The other issue as has been pointed out is that as Google's search is cluttered up with junk, people are finding it harder to find what they were looking for. If that's the case then people will switch to another search engine.
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Hopefully if Google are having a mass cull of scrapers, the browsing experience will improve.
The problem of having adsense chocked full of scrapers is that it's a financial disaster waiting to happen. It's called a "Bubble".
The business model of the scrapers who use adsense is to buy traffic cheaply, and hopefully convert most of the leads they get into clicks for other advertisers that are more profitable.
They don't have to make a lot of profit on the clicks - just have lots of them. However, most ads for scrapers lead to a site that is often cluttered with adsense ads for other scrapers.
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The current algorithm places scrapers highly based on CTR and will often remove ads from real advertisers that pay well to place them in the mistaken belief that they will convert better. The ONLY reason the convert is that there is no content on these pages, and people click out - often via an advert. But that madness is another thread.....
Scenario:
Visitor arrives on the site, and sees an interesting ad. Clicks on it and arrives at scraper. "This isn't what I want - this ad looks promising". Click - another scraper. All that has happened is webmasters have paid / recieved a few cents for a visitor to come and go. Nobody has purchased anything. Adsense can only work if people are flexing the plastic and buying goods and services off of genuine advertisers that have goods and services to sell.
Now if you have the situation where a lot of the advertisers are scrapers, and Google (in it's wisdom / madness) has placed ads for other scrapers on the scraper, then all that is happening is webmasters are exchanging small amounts of money in exchange for traffic. It's pure bubble mentality, and bubbles burst.
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Adsense HAS to be underpinned by real advertisers selling things to customers - marginalising them in favour of scrapers is absolutely crazy. Hopefully if Google are booting out scrapers they have finally realised this. What took you so long Google? Google's financial future rests on then not messing up adsense and their search engine - they HAVE to get rid of the scrapers, and SHOULD ban them for life.
posted by Don Marchand @ 6:07 AM
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