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> then combined anywhere from 20 to 40 of these answers and publish them as a blog post.

yeah i've been hitting a ton of those lately.

> I do believe it would be possible to create a very large dataset of these copycat sites

Would they just move to creating and using new domains with the same content as soon as traffic to the old becomes drops? (What looks like the spammers in the original post are doing)

But something does need to be done to these sites.

> move to creating and using new domains

This is a decades-old spammer trick. Google used to not rank brand new domains very high for this reason.

It's hard not to think that the only reason Google abandoned most of its old site ranking heuristics was that they were filtering out too many sites with lots of Google ads. The spam sites now infesting Google's first-page results don't look very different from the spam sites I saw back in the early 2000's. (There's more JavaScript, but modern search spiders run every page in a VM before reading the DOM, so that doesn't fool anyone.)

Fingerprint the site’s content so the new domain name isn’t able to SEO a good score.

> bet those copycats are making absolute bank from ads even if the majority of developers immediately close the site

I bet the majority of developers block ads

When on platforms let them at least

“developers”

yeah, the ones using SO

> What a joke.

It is simple. Google is making more money from copycat sites then from original content...

I think this just isn’t how Google work. I would expect to see a lot more spam if Google were happy to collect money from advertising on spam sites.

I think that as Google became more complicated, bigger, and ML based the average Googler begins to understand the system less and less well. At a certain point a problem comes up and they just don't know how to solve it that well or their bureaucracy makes solving it to painful or the people who solve problems quickly have all gone to companies where they can do that.

… on the short term.

Does the market care about anything else?

I'm sorta happy Google is turning to garbage.

Actually forcing a search engine back into the reliable index of valuable sources would be great.

Imagine you to a white list approach to a search engine where a human or AI does an approval first.

For all we know the sites have better internationalizations and cater to audiences invisible from a US-based perspective.

These sites are just scraping SO and dumping the text from the question+answers in a blog-style format.

I don’t think this is a cultural issue, I fail to see how this can be considered value add by anyone.

I found that Google will even rank a quote from an issue tracker on one of those "clones with advert/malwar overlays" higher than the original.

Also sites that scrape mailing list archives and cover it in ads rank higher than the actual archive site.

A/B tests can show datapoints where these sites convert better on average. Sites aren't chosen for cultural legacy but based on hitting the correct kpis.