The underside of blog with an RSS feed or having any site with easily readable content is that sooner or later it will get scraped and duplicated. Popular sites like Wikipedia are regular scraped and placed in "Made For Adsense" sites that don’t do much but bring in a few dollars for their owner. You would expect that such sites wouldn’t do well so far as PageRank goes. However, these sites apparently didn’t get penalized that much, if at all, in the recent Google Toolbar PageRank update. In fact, many went up.

On the flipside, sites that used Text Link Ads or other link exchange schemes to pass PageRank seem to have taken a hit this time around. There are several lists of blogs and other sites that took a big drop in rank around the blogosphere. That’s why you’ll see scrapped sites or junk content sites outranking many quality sites after this update.

My question is do you think this is a growing trend? First we saw BlogRush leave many sploggers and affiliate marketers in their system while kicking out quality blogs seemingly on a whim. Now Google is going after link sellers while giving content-jackers and Markov chainers a free pass.

Could it indicate that telling the difference between a quality site and a dupe or junk site is becoming more difficult?

Are sploggers and marketers becoming more adept in their craft?

Are ‘handcrafted’ sites judged more harshly by reviewers and ‘bots than well crafted automated sites?

Leave me a comment and let me hear your thoughts on this.

Google
Google, PageRank