I received a lot of private email on the subject of my scraper sites post. I asked some folks and they said that I could share their thoughts anonymously - most are worried about reprisal from Google, though I'm forced to wonder how much the search giant could care about a few grumblers in SEO.

"These scraper sites exist because of adsense.  The current strategy to combat them is to ban the domain.  When google starts banning adsense accounts these scrapers will disappear.

I can not understand why google has not taken such a simple approach - it would enable them to disable 10,000 scrapers at a time containing millions of crap pages.  They must like these scrapers as they generate a lot of revenue, plus they harvest a lot of money and clog the SERPs of competing engines - where a sandbox strategy has not been implemented. The real problem with these scrapers for the average merchant or even the powerful site is that they cut off traffic flow for the very minor keywords."

This makes sense to me. Adsense is largely responsible for the existence of scrapers - if Google reviews AdSense ads, why not publisher sites?

"The quality of clicks on the adsense has to be very low.  When a site puts two large rectangles of adsense in your face and nothing else then lots if surfers are going to click something even if it doens't interest them that much - it is either click, close the window or use back button.  Imagine how much ad money is blown on meaningless clicks.

I wonder if google would make more money if content site adsense clicks were genuine instead of because the ad is clicked because there is nothing else interesting on the page as on a scraper site.  I am sure that lots of people do not bid on content site ads because they know that the ads will appear on scrapers.  In a world without scraper sites more people would bid for the content ads and if that was the case they might be able to justify higher bids because the conversion rate would be super.  If this is true then the people who own genuine content sites would be rewarded in a larger way and that would drive the creation of more and better content and thus promote the entire web in a positive way."

I like this thinking - matching good policy with increased profit. I believe that's the only way Google will shut down the Adsense farms that dominate the web. Only when "doing no evil" matches up with greed will they really switch over. It could be a long while...