But if I did I would happily use them – why? because traffic is our business, not content.
Don’t get me wrong I put a lot of energy to my content & presentation, but I don’t kid myself that most visitors would happily buy from a less content rich site. It was just a case that they stumbled across my site instead of someone else’s.
Ooh! I am sitting back in my ring side seat to watch this thread!
Seriously, you would think differently if you were the victim of an attack. Trust me, get ites banned becaue of a black hat scraper and you look at this differently.
Blackhat ain’t going away. The SE’s can’t keep ahead long enough. There are some clever people out there who make a lot of money. Think about it – clever techies with rebellious attitude, throw in the money incentive and add a bit of bravado and they aren’t going nowhere.
I have done a bit of investigation in the last week to try and understand what we are up against – it ain’t pretty and it scares me.
I decided to email a guy who is quite active on a few forums and asked him whether he can REALLY get other people banned. His exact reply was “I exist to use other people’s website to make money AND to get them banned”. Proceeded to tell me how much fun it is….