Why Are People Building Automated Image Scraper Sites That Link Back to the Original Site They Took the Image From?

ryandiscord

ryandiscord

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I have a dumb question. What is the point of these spammy looking sites that scrape images then link directly to the original site's image?

Looking at backlinks of my own and competitors, I come across these sites with super simple layouts, text logo, and nothing but keyword optimized pages loaded with scraped images. Most have a DMCA or copyright page where you can contact them to remove them. These sites don't rank for too much (some not even indexed), have little to no ads. No affiliate links.

One competitor site had about 60 of these sites linking to it but, with a period as the anchor text for all of them. Does linking directly to an image pass pagerank? Are these PBN sites? Some of them have nofollow on all of the outbound links, wouldn't that defeat the purpose of a PBN?
 
Can you give an example of the above? Do you know if the IPs were different, or the 60 were on a WP multi-site or something?
 
ryandiscord said:
I have a dumb question. What is the point of these spammy looking sites that scrape images then link directly to the original site's image?

Looking at backlinks of my own and competitors, I come across these sites with super simple layouts, text logo, and nothing but keyword optimized pages loaded with scraped images. Most have a DMCA or copyright page where you can contact them to remove them. These sites don't rank for too much (some not even indexed), have little to no ads. No affiliate links.

One competitor site had about 60 of these sites linking to it but, with a period as the anchor text for all of them. Does linking directly to an image pass pagerank? Are these PBN sites? Some of them have nofollow on all of the outbound links, wouldn't that defeat the purpose of a PBN?
Click to expand...

The reasons are many. Some are a matter of taking advantage of mere percentage points of ROI through a mostly automated build & deployment workflow...and of course taking advantage of others' assets... A lot of this stuff that's seen is entirely scripted and automated, and produced at scale. In some cases, the purpose may be flooding the SERPs and pushing competition out. In others, parasitic traffic loss. In others yet, picking up pennies of return off of others' content efforts. As with most things, when the reasons are not obvious, often it means someone is working an angle of some sort.
 
phartso said:
Can you give an example of the above? Do you know if the IPs were different, or the 60 were on a WP multi-site or something?
Click to expand...

60 sites had the period anchor text. there are more than 900 image scraping domains in question pointing to this one particular competitor. Shared IP addresses in ranges of 5 to about 20 sites each address. All of these links newly acquired, along with their spike in search visibility in SEMRush.

turbin3 said:
The reasons are many. Some are a matter of taking advantage of mere percentage points of ROI through a mostly automated build & deployment workflow...and of course taking advantage of others' assets... A lot of this stuff that's seen is entirely scripted and automated, and produced at scale. In some cases, the purpose may be flooding the SERPs and pushing competition out. In others, parasitic traffic loss. In others yet, picking up pennies of return off of others' content efforts. As with most things, when the reasons are not obvious, often it means someone is working an angle of some sort.
Click to expand...

Interesting, I knew there had to be some kind of angle. The competitor is big enough that it is possible somebody or several somebodies snagged their images in an effort to pursue these angles.
 
I suspect that it could be one of two things.

1. The competitor wilfully set the sites up as tier 2 sites to rank better, based on the PBN strategy. This doesn't work anymore, however.

2. Another competitor, knowing that the PBN strategy doesn't work, is using it to negatively against that competitor as an attempt to outrank and gain that competitor's positions.

This is not dislike Gossip Girl.

giphy.gif
 
doublethinker said:
I suspect that it could be one of two things.

1. The competitor wilfully set the sites up as tier 2 sites to rank better, based on the PBN strategy. This doesn't work anymore, however.

2. Another competitor, knowing that the PBN strategy doesn't work, is using it to negatively against that competitor as an attempt to outrank and gain that competitor's positions.

This is not dislike Gossip Girl.

giphy.gif
Click to expand...
Actually, what caught my attention is that they appear to have skyrocketed in the SERPs around the same time they acquired 3,600 new links and 80% of them pointing to jpgs. That's not to say the remaining 20% isn't of high quality. So whatever it is they're doing, it's working well for them.
 
Link building, tiers, PBNs...all the stuff that "doesn't work" does in fact still work when done right. The point a lot of people (here at least) are making is that, the investment of time and resources necessary to do them right is often a negative ROI effort for the average marketer. Their time can often be much better spent in the traditional roles of marketing (creation, engagement, relationship-building, etc. etc.) and product development.

Prentzz is spot on. Start with an LLC as your legal entity and financial vehicle. At the point you need to grow beyond that and diversify your operation, you will likely have reached the point that you are paying a professional to help you make those decisions.
 
It's because they're getting tons of rankings in Google images and then have Adsense or CPM display ads on those pages. They're making incremental earnings on it, multiplied by millions.

Google knows about it, and because there's no ad fraud going on, they have no incentive to clean it up. There's not that much pressure or eyeballs on Google Images ranking results, so they're letting it ride until they're MADE to stop from a public outcry. It's identical to the "Right Arrow" Adsense design that was being used to defraud advertisers by making users think it was a pagination arrow. It went on way too long until the pressure built up.

It's like parked pages and things like that. Old people get into those websites and end up going through all of the internal links and racking up the ad impressions and clicks. They possibly have traffic botted on them too.
 
I ran across something sort similar to this 3-4 months ago. This was more of rank and bank of years past.

I got sucked in and spent half a day going down a rabbit hole. They had about 80 scrapper sites with 50K+ pages and each page pointed back to a page on their money site. Those sites had a lot of "interesting" links pointing them.

But as @turbin3 said, there is more then meets the eye sometimes.



 
Generally,they scrape from top ranking pages. So,they don't rank sites rather they scrape from top ranking sites . In home design niches,they do it a lot. Even I thought for a while they cause rankings till I got those spam links to my site. :smile: It had virtually no effect on rankings in my case.
 
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