Scraping content is taking content from other places on the web and publishing it on your own site. There are many websites that only contain pieces of other websites or stolen content. Many sites will take articles from other websites and publish them as if they were their own, or will copy entire websites.
Scraping content is taking the content from other sources and publishing it on your own site. There are many websites that only contain the articles or information of other websites. They take articles from other websites which is similar to stealing. Such content is referred as ‘Scraped Content’ as it is not original and it is other’s knowledge which comes in the form of information or articles.
Web Scraping is a technique to simulate the behaviour of a web site user to effectively use the web site itself as a web service to retrieve data or introduce new data. Scraping is a kind of term through which you can gather data/information from World Wide Web. Through this you can get data as per your requirements and also you can set your rules.
Scraper sites were a menace to the search engines before couple of years. 100% of scraper sites don’t have any original contents. All they do is they have search engine crawlers like what Google has. They search Google for a particular keyword phrase and index all the URLs that come up in top 1000 for that particular keyword phrase. Then they start crawling most of those URLs and fetch a block of contents from those pages indexed. So if the scraper sites crawl over 500 URLs they can easily get 200 words content from each URL. So that is like 100,000 words website in a matter of hours.
Scrapers mainly target sites like Wikipedia or other content sites which has lot of juicy contents. As soon as all the contents are indexed the scraper sites use content generation software to create 100s of pages with all the scraped contents.
All the hard work many website owners did were stolen by these scraper sites and in some cases the scraper sites out rank the original content of a website. This could be because of the diversity of the content the scraper sites had compared to small websites who have only 5 to 10 pages. Webmaster and site owners complained in forums and through spam reports to search engines. For many years scraper sites were pretty obvious in search results.
Today scraper sites are rarely successful. Especially after the panda update which sees the quality of the article and site scraper sites lost its value. Scraper sites were an important search engine manipulation which the search engines found difficult to eradicate. Still scraper sites appear in other country search results but mostly filtered in US results.
Google has provided examples of what they consider scraping…
- Sites that copy and republish content from other sites without adding any original content or value
- Sites that copy content from other sites, modify it slightly (for example, by substituting synonyms or using automated techniques), and republish it
- Sites that reproduce content feeds from other sites without providing some type of unique organization or benefit to the user
- Sites dedicated to embedding content such as video, images, or other media from other sites without substantial added value to the user
There are content scrapers which are in fact web crawlers that roam around the web to steal content from other sites. They cater to websites which survive on other’s content.
Put a canonical tag in your html to save your content.
How to Stop Content and Website Scrapers
- Run a Whois Lookup and discover who owns the domain.
- Go to the domain or hosting company directly
- File a complaint with Google via DMCA.