I just had a trackback from a site I didn’t recognize. So I look it up and find that it’s one of the “zombie-blogs” popping up left and right. What is it all about? It’s providing “poker news”, namely taking parts of content from poker blogs, slapping some ads on it and that’s that. Then I go ahead and the server admin is telling me something along the lines of “if you don’t want your content available around the net, just stop pinging search-engines” – errm wtf?
The site in question, which shall receive no further link love through this post, is a clear case of content scraping in order to monetize other people’s content. The only thing that it’s keeping it from being outright 100% content theft is that it’s providing a “read more” link leading to the original authors blog, but does this make it any better? So you get a linkback, but the thing is that it’s still using the content in order to slap ads on them.

Anyone got some hands-on experience with similar sites? What’s your opinion on such sites? Does a linkback make something like this legit in your eyes?