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by Lammy 2260 days ago
> I also abused the hell out of Yahoo Pipes - I would run RSS feeds through like 15 different languages with Babelfish before back to English, just for kicks.

For a while it was common to find SEO-spam sites composed entirely of posts generated this way. They would translate from a source language back to it in a roundabout way and end up with an article that was "different enough" to count as unique content to Google.
1 comments
smcl 2259 days ago
A British MP (I cannot for the life of me remember who) came under fire for owning a company made its money doing this - take existing content, shuffle the language round a bit and publish it with loads of ads.
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matthewheath 2259 days ago
Likely to be Grant Shapps

> In 2012, Google blacklisted 19 of the Shapps's business websites for violating rules on copyright infringement related to the web scraping-based TrafficPayMaster software sold by them

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grant_Shapps#Business_ventures

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smcl 2259 days ago
Yes! That's him. I only knew about that one, but this other one mentioned afterwards is hella shady too:

> It cost $497 and promised customers earnings of $20,000 in 20 days. Upon purchase,

> the "toolkit" was revealed to be an ebook, advising the user to create their own

> toolkit and recruit 100 "Joint Venture Partners" to resell it for a share of the

> profits

Sort of like a pyramid scheme, really. Incredibly this appears to have scarcely affected him, he is still an MP :-O

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