One of our biggest competitors in an eCommerce niche is very black hat using content scraping. Here is an overview of what strategy they seem to be using.
1. Their main site has maybe seven pages on it, few landing pages, just the core prices/contact/order functionality and a home page optimized for conversions. No articles/inner pages/landing pages
2. They compile a huge list of keywords, mostly long tails
3. Scrape content that shows up in related queries from multiple sites
4. Spin it with content spinners of any quality.
4. Host the scraped content on what appears to parasite pages on other sites. Often in entirely unrelated niches. Like a random inner page on a rafting site for a website that sells fried chicken (example, not our actual niches). Use an optimized title tag with exact match for the long tail.
5. Hide the content under a div that is essentially a copy-paste of the website's home page that is conversion-optimized. Normal users can't really see it, but it is visible by viewing source code or right click -> inspect element and delete the div. Clicking anywhere on the div takes the user to the actual site.
6. Do this with like 5-20 sites for the same keyword and try to take as many of the results on the front page as possible. If some go down, others may stay up.
7. Automate process (?) or outsource work with a sizable budget to pump out pages faster than they are deindexed or otherwise removed.
8. ???
9. Profit
Anyone have experience in this area? Hasn't been a problem for us necessarily although would be helpful to understand the process in more depth.
