Well, I have noticed a kind of snowballing effect of pagerank caused by scraper sites. Yes, they still exist and still manage to rank. It works like this. Once you get ranked high enough in Google for a keyword to get picked up by a spammer creating a scraper site, you get even more backlinks which increases your pagerank. I have seen this firsthand on the sites I work on in my day job. The site had a Pagerank of 1 and now it's at 4 without me starting any sort of linking campaign. It just had three well placed and themed links from other sites which gave it the PR1. It went to PR4 due to this snowballing effect. And when I refer to Pagerank, I know many discount it, but I am only using it here because the traffic to the site increased expontentially with the Pagerank increase. It would seem to be an endless cycle, especially for sites that managed to find a niche before the blackhats got to it. And believe me there are still a few very profitable ones, but they are mainly retail sales type sites, ones you would have to have a warehouse and at least a few employees to run. I am just looking for others who have noticed this.
I have noticed scraper sites linking to my site - yahoo counts them as backlinks. But I doubt they actually improve PR though. Are you sure nobody else linked to you as well? Also: the PR sending pages might just have gotten more links, hence more PR - your PR might simply go up that way as well. And your trust, and their trust, would have gone up as well, simply because the links and the sites have been around longer.
I've seen thousands of backlinks show up from scraper sites. However, I'm with kh7 on this one, I doubt they are beneficial in ranking at all. Probably discounted quickly as being duplicate.
So, possibly the niche is so limited in its online presence that a few links would give it ranking by default.
PR4 is really not that hard to get. I've seen a site get that rank with a mere 2 trusted links (DMOZ and a link from my pr4 portfolio page + its own three internal links). I don't think PR has to do with niche. Some links just count like a lot.
there is bunch of sites that I compete with that rank great in google and the vast mjority of their backlinks come from screen scrapers they are old sites with like maybe 20 real links , then like 200-1000 screen scraper links I think google counts at least a few of them
20 real links can be a lot in small niches. Combine that with the sites being old (therefore with built in trust) and you can see why they rank well.
yeah well I still think the scraper links count for something I don't see any sites with 20 real links and no scraper links or other links ranking too well for my terms
Are the 20 links comparable? Are the domain-ages comparable? If yes to both - you are probably correct. If one or the other has a no to it, there's your answer.
I think the scraper sites links count at least a little, unless you are saying that that the Google algorithm is perfect. Hmmm... Something I doubt. I am talking about a retail site that had 3 links to it months before it had a PR1 rank. So these three links gave it the PR1. Then a few months later, without a linking campaign, I notice hundreds of new links, all scraper sites. Result of this: PR4 and a jump from $5000 a month to $40,000 a month in gross sales.
Just so I follow..the scraper sites scraped your content, along with In bound links..which in effect built your IB links tremendously...correct? probably 1 person witha bunch of subdomains no doubt...?
No, this is about sites like this: http://directory.jayde.com/industrial_legal.html or http://www.dkcoffee.com/coffeebean/ or http://www.mrviolin.com/cremonaviolin/ They scrape google results (or something), then turn it into a page with adsense on it. These link to my site - and now they may actually get some pagerank.
Ahhhh..not very nice. I was thinking YOU were getting some PR...but looks like they pull from you...Im sure Google will have this fixed in no time... yeah rt..
keywords: old. G loooooooooves old established sites. just look at the cheap viagra and buy viagra serps: idk if it's still there, but some guy inserted pages on a bunch of .edus to his viagra/cialis/phentermine pharmacy and got most of the top 10 rankings because the pages were on crusty, trustranked old domains.
Google doesn't need to fix anything. This is totally unique content, that probably shows up only on some weird long tail searches. The way I found these pages is through the MSN link: command (very useful by the way, they organize the links better than both yahoo and google do). So MSN indexes them, yahoo indexes them, but google probably doesn't even bother. I don't expect link-love from there. I mean, why would those links count like anything compared to the wikipedia and other quality links that point to my domain? What I meant was that the link here on DP would boost their pagerank a bit. On the other hand, if people from DP go and report them they will have to take the adsense down (which is perhaps what you meant?).