Maybe you guys already know about this but while searching for a question I came across this site: www.systut.com
Looks like someone is extracting the questions. They do link back to SO though. Not sure if this is causing any real harm.
Add a comment
|
3 Answers
The content on SO is licensed CC wiki with attribution which means, in short, that anyone can use it as long as they post attribution (ie, a link back here is fine).
This was done intentionally to avoid CDDB, IMDB, and similar issues with "Users generate the content that we own and profit off of."
answered Apr 14, 2010 at 3:54
It's unlikely content copiers will achieve much, because search engines do not favor content duplication. So IMO it's a big waste of time.
There were and probably still are copies of wikipedia made for the same purpose but they are essentially invisible because of low ranks.
-
Certainly, search engines try to avoid content duplication in their search results, and I doubt that systut is generating much Googlejuice with their naive approach, but content scraping is something that SEO bottom feeders do use with success, to make their offerings look contentful. It doesn't seem to be that difficult to fool Google's indexer into thinking your page is novel. Commented Apr 14, 2010 at 8:27
-
You'd be surprised how much traffic some Wikipedia mirrors get. Right now there are probably a dozen which are in the top 100k by Alexa rank. One reason it might happen is that they are not updated live, so sometimes you look for old content of a Wikipedia article and you get a clone. Then some people link a specific page on the "wrong" domain and that page gets a boost until it comes even before than Wikipedia. It doesn't happen often but for some pages it's a real leak of traffic.– NemoCommented Feb 8, 2020 at 8:18
They are not following the attribution requirements (linked at the bottom of every page):
4. Hyperlink each author name directly back to their user profile page on the source site (e.g., http://stackoverflow.com/users/12345/username)
Instead, their author links lead to http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/?tagnames=SOME-TAG-HERE&sort=active.
But they are following requirements 1-3. Perhaps a gentle nudge to point this out to them is all that is needed. (Go ahead and email them if you like; doubt I will.)
