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A comment on Matt Cutts is looking for scraper sites. Parent comment

Re:Matt Cutts is looking for scraper sites by bushido on Friday February 28, 2014 @09:36AM (#7318850)
They don't actually link to the wikipedia URL. They mask a link that leads to another Google page "/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&...." which in turn responds with a 200 OK page that redirects to Wikipedia.

Sure it passes the keywords etc. But this likely reduces the number of people visiting Wikipedia, while increasing Google's ad revenues, if anyone but Google did this they'd be potential blacklisted by Google.

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Re:Matt Cutts is looking for scraper sites by VikingCoder on Friday February 28, 2014 @10:43AM (#7319320)
Actually, they do link to the wikipedia URL.

href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scraper_site" appears directly in the source code of that web page.

It also has an onmousedown handler that rewrites the URL to point at Google, so they can tell which link you clicked, to improve their ranking system. And Google works very closely with sites to make sure the sites know how to understand the referrals.

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