What's The Deal With Knock-Off Wikipedia Sites?

becool

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Can someone bring me up to speed on the story behind knock-off wikipedia sites where the webmasters appear to be scraping the entirety (or significant portions) of Wikipedia and re-posting the content on their own sites (which sometimes incorporate some variation of "wiki" in the domain name)?

First, what is the purpose of this practice? Are the webmasters trying to get ranked for some quick cash before the sites get dinged for a duplicate content type penalty?

Second, for those of you with Wikipedia backlinks to your own sites, what are you doing in terms of disavowing backlinks from knock-off wikipedia sites? Are you disavowing as a matter of course/a knee-jerk reaction by virtue of the duplicative nature of the content?

What's the deal?

Thanks
 
I see this on a lot of business sites too. They'll have the entirety of Wikipedia orphaned behind a 5 page business site.

I've always figured that they think boosting the number of pages they have indexed by Google helps their main pages rank higher.

If they're nofollow I don't disavow them. If they're dofollow, and a lot of them are, I disavow. It's always 100% spam.

Google doesn't seem to hurt you or them for the duplicate content. They said in the past when they identify a copy of content they apply a canonical tag to the original so it gets all of the benefit and the duplicate never ranks. They don't catch everything, that's for sure.
 
Samwise89 said:
I see this on a lot of business sites too. They'll have the entirety of Wikipedia orphaned behind a 5 page business site.

I've always figured that they think boosting the number of pages they have indexed by Google helps their main pages rank higher.
Click to expand...

I would have expected that someone capable of scraping Wikipedia using a scraper or through their database/API (I've heard that's a thing for Wikipedia) would know better than to think this practice is good at boosting the number of pages without potential scrutiny (unless they're expecting some sort of temporary win) but what do I know.

Then again, a monkey could scrape a site. Those animals are smart.

@Ryuzaki and/or @CCarter - Any additional insight?
 
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