Cloning websites is black hat?

hello,

I was just wondering, do you consider website cloning a black hat method?

I would also appreciate any good links concerning the cloning and localization business if you have any. I guess good links are freelancer sites, clone-script sites, best blog articles about it and such..

thankz

It depends what you mean when you say cloning. Are you cloning the content or just the web graphics? If you clone the content...there is really no point in doing that as google will see the site as duplicate content. You would need to mix up the content and adjust it accordingly.

Damn! I do know google penalizes for duplicate content. With cloning i actually meant cloning of website services, e.g. cloning of 43things. So in these cases the cloning task mostly revolves around programming.

Btw. how smart is google. If you translate content, will google understand it's "duplicate" content? My guess would be no. The most obvious similarity in such cases would probably be the similarity between the external links on the two pages...?