Sorry, calling BS on this one. By simply copying a site you get flagged as having duplicate content.
Then there's DMCA. I've seen an e-commerce site's homepage get de-indexed, killing the business, due to 1 single image being used for which the site owner didn't have copyright.
SEO undoubtedly has many shady practises, but "professional SEO" is actually really difficult and involves much more than cloning competitor sites and somehow getting away with it.
"duplicate content" is a problem for both, the original site and the copycat. But the copycat doesn't rely on SEO in this example. It just buys traffic in AdWords. So the duplicate content penalty would harm only the original site.
Google must surely be able to tell the difference between the original site and copying site because of timestamps. How would an Adwords campaign change that?
Maybe Google can tell the difference, but, as I did SEO some years ago, we didn't relyed on it. Duplicate content was considered a problem regardless of who published first.
Duplicate content is a problem for organic rankings. In payed search it may be a problem for the quality factor (not sure). But even if it impacts the quality factor you just have to pay more to achieve the same result.
1. You don't do this (plagiarism) on your main site.
2. DMCA is a US law. It may or may not apply, depending on the company I referred to. Also, going to court depends on a lot of factors.
3. You don't necessarily need to clone verbatim. You could generate content automatically (or with manual help) targeting the same keywords, but based on parsed content.
4. This is not trying to be in organic search results. Promoted solely via ads.
Sorry, my experience has been that a SEO and content generation (as it happens today in Google and FB) ranks high among shady and manipulative practices. Add: Of course, there are many good companies too.
How much is "duplicate content" penalised in reality? How many times have you searched for an error message or technical issue and got a link to StackOverflow, and also on the front page some ad-laden site that's just a direct scrape of the exact same SO page? It's a common occurrence for me.
Then there's DMCA. I've seen an e-commerce site's homepage get de-indexed, killing the business, due to 1 single image being used for which the site owner didn't have copyright.
SEO undoubtedly has many shady practises, but "professional SEO" is actually really difficult and involves much more than cloning competitor sites and somehow getting away with it.