If promoting spam sites filled with ads was so profitable why wouldn't Google just put more ads on its search results page and cut out the middle man
This all assumes that Google's reputation remains untarnished by merely linking to spam rather than filling their own site with spam, but I don't think that's quite the case. Google's reputation is intricately tied up with the quality of the results it gives.
Google's reputation is intricately tied up with the quality of the results it gives.
I think the problem here is the question of whether an adsense-adorned page with scraped content is judged "low quality" by the people doing the search.
I'm no expert in other domains, but judging by the "I CAN HAZ CODES" programmers out there, if they type a programming question into Google and they get a page with scraped content from StackOverflow, will they care?
My guess is that if the scraped content has the answer, they're happy. They aren't interested in doing more research, looking the author's SO reputation, or anything else. They get their answer, and maybe they click an AdSense link if it catches their eye.
JM2C!
I can only recall being frustrated with the scraper sites when they don't have the answer I need, because when I go back to the Google results and try another page I find that they have the exact same scraped content. Out of the first ten or twenty results there are only a few unique pieces of content.
Perhaps if Google eliminated redundancy from their results I'd never even notice whether the content was scraped or not.