Scrapers and What they Do – and What You can Do!

Has your content ever been scraped? What does that mean for your site, and what can you do about it?

The world of SEO is, has been and always will be highly competitive! There is a constant battle raging to get better and badder backlinks, and a race to run in order to get to the top of the search engine rankings. In the meantime, search engines get smarter and better at finding black hatters – or so we hope!

The worst of the black hats are the dreaded content scrapers. These individuals simply steal all their content from other websites. They use RSS feeds, direct copy and pasting and even automated macros. Usually victims of these scrapers have new websites with unique content which they have painstakingly created – and to have these black hatted hackers steal their hard work is the greatest insult. Such scrapers simply copy the content in whole, and never link back – and then they buy links or use other unethical methods to boost their own rankings over the poor website they stole their content from! 　

Search engines are robots, and can often only judge authority through different variables such as age and the number of pages indexed. If a scraper steals the content of a lower ranked site or blog with few visitors, then the scraper’s website will be indexed while the original is penalized. That’s not right, but it happens!

How do we fight back? There are several different ways to combat scrapers and take them down. You can set your RSS feeds to ’summary’ which will give the scraper less motivation to get the content because it will only be an excerpt. This still won’t stop ones that visit your site and copy and paste content directly either manually or automatically.

There are tools you can use that hide links in content so you get an automatic link back, or which can force the scraper to accept a link back to your site. You can also Google your content frequently – if you copyright everything (which costs less than most think) then you can order them to take down your content, pay you for it, or be faced with a DCMA notice, which could result in their being banned form search engines.