In searching, I sometimes see scraper sites show up in the SERPs. Chances are they have precisely the right keword density and all the other on-page optimizations for that search term. But we all know that it's backlinks that put sites in the SERPs. So, how do these sites get backlinks? They won't get natural backlinks becaue the content is crap. They won't be accepted in the co-op because the content is crap. If they buy links, quality sites will reject them because it's a scraper. All you could buy would be poor quality links. All I can think of is links from the owner's network of sites. Your site trustrank is somewhat based on who you link to, so your trustrank from your own quality sites decreases by linking to scraper sites. You work hard to improve your quality sites, so linking out to crap sites is counter-produtive. (You can see a pseudo-trustrank in action at siteadvisor - scroll down to see outbound links. No, it's not a search engine, but they analyze trust in a way that the SEs could.) So, I can't figure out how scraper sites get enough quality backlinks to rank for anything at all, but clearly they do. Any ideas on how this works?
http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=bad+credit+loans&prssweb=Search&ei=UTF-8&fr=sfp&x=wrt #4 gotbadcredit Just a scrape of yahoo news http://search.msn.com/results.aspx?q=car+parts+muskogee&FORM=QBRE #7 from a .be domain is a worthless site. http://search.msn.com/results.aspx?q=cheap+clothing+seattle&FORM=QBRE #1 Airline tickets, etc. nothing but links #2 bermuda vacations etc. really bad. I'm not finding any right now in Google. They have done a great job improving the quality of sites that come up. MSN is terrible when in comes to scrapers.