Sorry Mark, but Capitalizing on discrepancies in bid/ask markets is not fraud. Creating a “newsmaster site” or “Niche Aggregator” (he calls them splogs) is not fraud.
And who the hell is he to complain about splogs and scraper sites anyway? He …

What I actually try to say is, what does a a site that has only ‘nofollow’ links on it indicates about the site itself or the underlying software. Nothing more than: “Ok, I present you shit and we know it is shit, since our software is shit – so everything is marked as ‘nofollow’/simply not relevant”. I would be quite curious if there comes a day when the Googlebot also starts to think that way about the presenting site.

While I second your opinion that this is clearly done in order not to give credit to the linked sites, I still think that there is a huge difference how a scraper site uses the content of others. I run some site on my own – no I don’t ‘SEO’ and I still call it searchengine spamming – and often find my content ripped of even though I run some (as I would call them) ‘advanced’ bottraps. The way Icerocket does, I’m personally fine with since there is still a backreference to the original content. When I see entire pages regorganised and presented by your ‘colleagues’ as own content, that is the point where the trouble/fun starts for me . Mostly trouble, since most of the ’search engine guild’ does look to me more than marketers than programmers and seem to have no clue how to reorganise around Googles filters without getting caught/or even affecting the scraped sites. Ok, as for the later one I guess don’t give a shit…