Real content is definitely the way to go! There is no need to get greedy and mix in risky scraped content. It's just not worth losing it all!

Stop calling me names! I am not a "black hat"! Hey! I'm only human! Cut me some slack! I'm sorry but I could not resist the temptation to add some scraped content pages to my highly successful music web site! I had no idea it would get banned by Google!

Oh well... sometimes you learn some lessons the hard way!

And the lesson is:

NEVER use scraped content on a REAL CONTENT web site

Never ever use "scraped" or borrowed (some say stolen) content on a site you do not want banned. It's just not worth taking a chance that a good site will go bad and get banned.

I personally have lost several of my highly popular and successful high PageRank hand made real content web sites because I made the mistake of including a handful of pages with scraped search results. I'm not even talking thousands of pages, just mere hundreds... but they WERE scraped and I paid the price.

Its not worth risking your legit sites position on Google by including any "unauthorized" content. I regret adding the scraped search engine directory style pages (often referred to as Portal Pages) because the amount of traffic the already popular sites lost was significant.

Trust me, if you have a successful site, dont ever use scraped content on it.

Google wants to provide relevant results. Can you blame them?

Google re-defined the role of the search engine to an enamored public, who became infatuated with its spam free results (less spam at least). Google also had a tremendous impact on SEOs and internet marketers who had to adapt their businesses to harness the power of the free traffic that the monster Google could provide. I have to admit for a short period I was sleeping and didnt spend the necessary time adjusting as I should have, and when my business earnings dropped to an all time low about 3 or 4 years ago I had a massive wake up call.

Link Popularity and PageRank are the new standard

PageRank became the new standard for Google to rank web sites and it based PR on a formula that was determined by how popular a web page was. The more external links from other web pages with high PageRank to a page indicated this page was relevant and popular and therefore Google considered it as important. While they appeared to value lots of links, they seemed to favor links from other high PageRank pages. You see, pages could pass along PageRank to other pages. Web sites that had higher PageRank would have an advantage and would in most cases rank higher than similar pages that were not as popular.

PageRank is PAGE SPECIFIC, not SITE specific. Each page has different PR.

While not as important as external links, internal links too result in a site passing PageRank. If the pages have proper linking, the internal pages can even focus power to a small set of pages, almost forcing increased rankings for the text linked on those pages.

As with anything, the webmaster community figured out that lots of links to a web site could boost the rankings and link farms and linking schemes grew in popularity. Also webmasters began to buy and sell links based on PageRank.

In the case I cited above, I added a directory of around 200 machine generated pages to my popular music site for the purpose of trading links. Since the directory menu was linked on every page of my 600 page site it obtained it's own high PageRank. The pages had scraped content on them and I simply added links from partners to them. It worked for about 3 months and then suddenly the home page went from PageRank 6 to 0, and despite being in the index, not more than a dozen pages remained indexed.

My daily traffic dropped from 3,000 to less than 200 visitors a day. It was NOT worth tampering with a successful formula and the result was catastrophic, all because I got greedy and added those portal style directory pages with scraped search engine content.

I learned my lesson. Never ever mix in junk content, such as scraped search engine results onto a real content site. It'll likely get that site banned!