[CASE STUDY] Auto Scraped Site Based on Expired PR3 Domain Still Works

Nice. I've never run an affiliate site and never worked with affiliate sites at all, so this doesn't really pertain much to me and I can't meaningfully comment one way or the other. But it's nice to see a claim backed up with real figures. I suppose some affiliate experts might have some questions or negative comments to make (people always do...), and that's fine as at least it will become a debate based on real data. Glad that case studies are now allowed here and I hope there are a few more in the future.

Hey Niko-

I can confirm that this works. I did something similar. Up until a few months ago I was building autoblogs with thousands of posts based on thousands of google suggest long tail keywords. But I would use a redirection plugin to automatically redirect all the visitors to another "white hat" site. As soon as a visitor clicked on the page link in Google search they would bypass the autoblog and land on a white hat site that is monetized.

I do it this way because you can't put adsense on scraped content and if you plaster aff links all over a site with thousands of pages you'll get penalized for that too.

All the content was auto generated and scraped from other sites. This worked great until a few months ago.

Anyway, a couple weeks ago I built a new autoblog with 2400 posts (based on 2400 long tail keywords). But this time I built in on an expired domain with a PR of 1. The domain only had 30 backlinks but had good Maj seo metrics and a clean backlink anchor text.

I did not use Woocommerce. Instead I created a paypal button and automatically put the paypal button before the content on each post.

Within 8 days of building it, all 2400 pages are indexed and driving around 170 visitors per day.

I just built another one but with a new domain (not aged PR domain). I want to see if these are ranking because G thinks they are ecommerce sites or if it was all about the aged domain with PR.

Top seo's have said that you can get away with a lot more dup content on an ecommerce site versus a non ecommerce site. So we shall see.

Also, I don't actually monetize the autoblog (the paypal button is just to trick G into thinking it's an ecommerce site). I use a plugin I bought a long time ago. When someone clicks on the page title in Google search they are automatically redirected past the autoblog and to the adsense site.

It's a little more complicated than that but that's the gist of it.

If you're going to cloak, do it right.

Do this site need regular backlink?

I would think you would have to run the same experiment on a brand new domain to draw that conclusion to be honest.

The rankings you showed are for keywords I would call beyond weak in competition. I bet a new site could rank for those too, scraped content or not.

Just my $.02.

I have been using expired domains for affiliate datafeed and autoscraped Amazon sites. I could make sales on most sites I have the affiliate shops on. But the traffic and sales rarely last over a year. Lately, Google has been going after a particular affiliate data script that I was using and banning the sites. My advice would be if you use these scripts, you should drip the products in slowly. Better still, build your own or modify the script extensively so that it won't leave an easy footprint for Google to identify.

Why he is banned?

Nah he just wrote "banned" on signature.