Summary: This article explains scraper websites, what they are, what they do and the effect their activities have on your own website – and its SEO.
First, let’s establish what a scraper site is!
A scraper site is a website that takes some or all of its content from other websites by web scraping. Sometimes they don’t reference the source – sometimes they do – indeed, some even give the proper copyright notice. This can even be a legitimate practice – when scraping content off Wikipedia for example, who offer:
“…free copies of all available content to interested users. These databases can be used for mirroring, personal use, informal backups, offline use or database queries”.
Are search engines web scrapers? No – they’re are not classed as web scrapers because they crawl websites and index their finding by ranking/content. Search engines do not pass the information off as their own – they direct the search engine user to your site.
You would never think that there would be a positive to a scraper sites stealing your content. It turns out there is a positive from this, although this only works for well established sites. By contrast, if your website is new, a scraper site stealing your content could be bad news for you and you should seek to have that content removed from the offending site.
But for established sites, turning a negative into a positive, consider that web scrapers scrape your HTML coding and re-post it (no changes, totally copied from your site), and often embedded within your copy, there will be links. As long as your links are full links (URLs) and not relative links (e.g. ../../index.html) you’ll have the benefit of those links to your website – not a bad thing for SEO. Because Google has already spidered your content (as a well established site), you should still rank well for the original article. Having so many scrapers taking your valuable content may seem a daunting thing, but in many cases search engines haven’t discounted scraper website, they’ll just rank the content far lower than your article, and so the scraper gives you some coverage and link strength.
Another quick trick to try and milk this is to release your RSS feed of all of your content – RSS feeds are easy pickings for scrapers. They are a quick and easy way to grab lots of information quickly.
Enjoyed this article?
Subscribe to our RSS feed, follow us on Twitter or just simply recommend it.
Further Discussion
Leave a Response
Make sure you enter the * required information where indicated. Responses are moderated so please no link dropping, no keywords or domains as names; do not spam, and do not advertise!