www.affiliateconfession.com

I find it interesting that there are people on the net who literally scrape out a living day to day. I guess that’s what you’d say about those individuals who seem to think the only way to earn money on the web is to copy other people’s content. I just can’t get my mind around that kind of thinking, at least not in today’s era of more algorithmically (yes, that is a real word) advanced search engines.

I was alerted by a commentator yesterday about my post on the Moped niche where a scraper site ranked at the number one spot for a couple of search terms I suggested people look at. However, as I checked this morning, they are no where to be found. The weird thing about this particular scraper site in question is that it isn’t monetized in any way. No Google ads, banners, affiliate links or anything are on this site, yet it consistently outranks me for several of my keywords for a short time and then it’s off into obscurity again. Most splogs like this are monetized in some way, this one is the exception to the rule.

I also see big name bloggers getting scraped on a much more frequent basis. I’ve written a few guest posts for John Chow and won a couple of contests on his blog and every time I get a link from him, in my WordPress dashboard I see links coming at me from probably 10 scraper blogs before I see the links show up from John. It’s amazing that there are that many people who can’t, or won’t, do something original.

I saw a similar thing in an online forum where someone asked for a review of their financial blog and allthough it wasn’t a scraper site, the person had copied every bit of content from financial news and information sites. Every snippet of content I checked by copying and pasting it into Google was from another web site and this person had 20 or 30 posts already. What did they think they were doing and where did they get the idea they could make money long term with a blog built this way?

One of the cruelest things the Nazi’s did to prisoners during WWII, besides the heinous experiments they did on them, was in giving them meaningless work. Nazi guards would one day have prisoners move a huge pile of bricks across a 100 yard field, only to have them move the pile back the next day and and repeat that action again for several days. Or prisoners would be told dig a deep trench only to be told the next day to bury it and again the next day to dig the trench in the exact same spot. Madness soon set in for the captives.

I’m beginning to wonder how far behind the captives these scrapers are. There’s really no end to the work if you think your going to scrape your way to the top. You’ll never get there.