Basically, they steal and publish content from other sites on their site.
The search engines find it, and may give a duplicate content penalty to one of the sites displaying the content – not always the thieving site. Often the original site who had the content stolen gets a penalty.
The penalty results is lower search engine traffic. This is what is most upsetting.
One way to battle it is to report the copyright theft to the search engines. If it is proven to be a legitimate complaint, the offending site will most likely be penalized heavily, if not removed from the index entirely.
A secondary aspect is the theif profitting from their illegal activities by acquiring players (remember, in such sites such acquisitions are at the expense of honest webmasters).
Now, if the thief is displaying banners from casino affiliate programs, we expect the programs to stop any profit gained at our expense, and to close the offending affiliate account.
I feel the best way to discourage scraping (content theft) is to not make it profitable. It’s up to the programs to cooperate with us when we report theft of our content.
We have had reports from webmasters investigating some of the most notorious scraper sites that a casino itself may be responsible for quite a few scraper sites. Most notedly those taking top positions in yahoo and msn.
The site I have posted about in this thread has no affiliate links at all – not that I saw.
Some people think that the site is simply gathering links and information about sites to serve as a sort of directory or search engine for online gambling. Don’t be fooled. Legitimate directories do not take content directly from published pages, thereby triggering duplicate content penalties, and they certainly don’t list navigation anchors, etc. The composition of the text on this site is obviously scraped using automated scripts.