2 ms·
I'm having a hard time believing sourcetool's argument that they were more than an arbitrage spam site. It is a bunch of scraped content, with ads around it. I
by froo 18y ago
I'm having a hard time believing sourcetool's argument that they were more than an arbitrage spam site.
It is a bunch of scraped content, with ads around it. I don't see any additional value provided by sourcetool and I definitely don't believe the search engine argument as search engines generally add value by at least ranking pages somehow, there doesn't appear to be any logical order to how the pages are ranked more than when they appeared in the sourcetool database.
Some pages are nothing more than a series of keywords with ads around it, here's a perfect example chosen at random, I landed on a page for a business called "Sundeal", nothing but keywords.
The "Brief Description" are the exact words for the title tag of Sundeal's homepage, all other content (that is not part of the standard sourcetool layout) is simply the keywords meta repeated twice.
Even looking at the copyright notice down the bottom of the page "Copyright © 2005-06" makes it hard to believe this is in any way, shape or form a professional Internet Business.
I'd almost be inclined to say this article was paid placement itself.
Mod me down for those who don't agree, but I hold nothing but contempt for this sourcetool site.
- josefresco 18y agoIt's pretty much a glorified website directory, and not a great example of the types of sites that have a legitimate beef with Google's heavy-handed tactics.
- froo 18y agoGoogle's heavy-handed tactics. I don't agree with this, I think Google has every right to provide it's main customers (searchers) the best possible product that they can. If anything, removing sites like these actually cut into Google's profits. I have no problem with directories that are trying to drive legitimate, organic traffic to their sites, nor do I have a problem with any kind of web directory - I think that anyone who is adding value to the net should be commended. I just think that if their whole reason for existence is to convert inbound adwords clicks into outbound adsense clicks by using scraped content, how can that possibly be valuable? Most people here could easily replicate this site in the space of an afternoon and have the content up within days - grab an RDF dump from DMOZ, insert those URL's into any off the shelf spider and capture meta data from those pages and mash it up = instant spam site, does it add value? Most definitely not.
- davidw 18y agoI think what josefresco was trying to say was that there are other situations in which Google has been "heavy handed" with what are reported as real sites. This obviously isn't one of those.