Google has the ability to change the face of the internet in 2-3 years. They can detect the chaff and shut it down, and I wonder whether it’s an anti-competiton feature that they require that websites write a thousand words per page.

Still many copy/paste sites around. Crawl data, put a skin on top, publish on stolen domain to make it legit, clickfarm away!

Google looks for the canonical version of a document and then deduplicates before returning the result set.

You can add &filter=0 to the end of the search URL for a particular query to turn off the duplicate content filters.

An old school spam technique for some affiliates in the early days of Google was to buy a high PR link to their affiliate URL so that like site.com/?aff=123 would be the default version of the homepage & the branded searches for the merchant would then owe the affiliate the commissions until the rankings shifted again.