My memory is there were a spate of SO scraping sites that google would surface above SO and google just would not zap.

It would have been super trivial to fix but google didn’t.

My pet theory was that google were getting doubleclick revenue from the scrapers so had incentives to let them scrape and to promote them in search results.

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xp84 4 days ago | parent [-]

I remember those too! There were seemingly thousands of them!

Reminds me of my most black-hat project — a Wikipedia proxy with 2 Adsense ads injected into the page. It made me like $20-25 a month for a year or so but sadly (nah, perfectly fairly) Google got wise to it.

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20after4 4 days ago | parent [-]

I'm actually surprised it was only ~$20 a month.

	▲	xp84 a day ago \| parent [-]
		Honestly, if I'd gotten in earlier I bet it would have made more. I also made zero attempts to SEO it -- there were no links to it anywhere else on the Internet, so it would have been in the very first tranche of useless duplicative spam sites of that type to be cleaned up. It was up from like 2010-2013 or so.