yeah i've been hitting a ton of those lately.
Would they just move to creating and using new domains with the same content as soon as traffic to the old becomes drops? (What looks like the spammers in the original post are doing)
But something does need to be done to these sites.
This is a decades-old spammer trick. Google used to not rank brand new domains very high for this reason.
It's hard not to think that the only reason Google abandoned most of its old site ranking heuristics was that they were filtering out too many sites with lots of Google ads. The spam sites now infesting Google's first-page results don't look very different from the spam sites I saw back in the early 2000's. (There's more JavaScript, but modern search spiders run every page in a VM before reading the DOM, so that doesn't fool anyone.)
I bet the majority of developers block ads
It is simple. Google is making more money from copycat sites then from original content...
Actually forcing a search engine back into the reliable index of valuable sources would be great.
Imagine you to a white list approach to a search engine where a human or AI does an approval first.
I don’t think this is a cultural issue, I fail to see how this can be considered value add by anyone.
But the crazy part is that, for example - Ahrefs says that StackOverflow has "Organic traffic" in the range of 22 million per month. A lot of these copycat sites, at least the ones I saw - have a traffic range anywhere from 10k to 500k per month.
I mean, it's pretty insane just how well such sites can rank in Google, and you bet those copycats are making absolute bank from ads even if the majority of developers immediately close the site.
There's a lot going on with Google Search these days, a lot of people are complaining that sites that scrape content can easily rank really well for long-tail keywords. One case in particular, a site will scrape Google to collect "featured snippets" and "people also ask" - then combined anywhere from 20 to 40 of these answers and publish them as a blog post.
None of the words are changed, all questions/answers worded exactly the same. And Google puts these sites on page 1.
What a joke.