I ran into so many Stack Overflow "mirrors" yesterday like this: https://www.anycodings.com/1questions/400836/swiftui-update-...

10 years I gave up on a large project where I rehosted and organized dead Usenet forum content because Google's dupe-penalty detector was too good and too aggressive for content that you could barely find beyond a six-year-old cache hit where the origin website was long gone.

Meanwhile these Stack Overflow scrapers are just `<html>{copy-and-paste}</html>` and the same domains are still alive despite years of cloning.

Looks like it's time to boot my project back up.

It’s clearly not a copy and paste. I just visited that link on my phone and got blocked from viewing because I’m using an ad blocker.

Also lots of github scrapers

"All Rights Reserved."

Turning the knob one way explicitly might raise some anti-trust concerns, however the same motivation can be used to avoid turning the knob the other way and this can be done much more sneakily without leaving clear evidence - simply don't allocate budget/etc to projects that would turn the knob the other way and you're done.

I've noticed this with youtube. Even though I'm on desktop with an adblocker they repeatedly autoplay the same video with a creator embedded crypto promotion at the beginning (especially when it would be plausible to infer I'm asleep from user interaction and clock/watch time). Must be getting a cut (plus scamming the ad buyer).

This is a very old conspiracy theory that's been repeatedly debunked.

https://www.searchenginejournal.com/ranking-factors/google-a...

That link is about AdWords spend by the site in question, and not about displaying AdSense ads on the site. Totally unrelated.