Scrapers Are More Sophisticated

Writing by Nick Stamoulis on Tuesday, 15 of January , 2008 at 8:34 am

Content scraping is getting to be a big business, and the scrapers are getting ever more clever.

In the old days, content scrapers would copy/paste your content and slap AdSense ads on the page where your content was used and make a dollar or two before they were reported. Then those nasty bots came around and they were able to scrape your content without actually visiting your website. The bots did all the work in about 10 minutes. The “operator” simply input a list of keywords that the bot was to hone in on and when those keywords were found the content was scraped and held in the bots “memory.” Then the bot would be told where to put the content that was scraped, right alongside those pesky AdSense ads. There were called Made For AdSense sites, or MFAs. They worked and the scrapers could usually get by with making $10 or $15 per site before being taken down. You do that a couple of hundred times in one month and you’ve got a pretty decent income. Do a thousand times each month and you’ll be a rich man before you know it.

Well, Google seems to have cracked down on the MFA sites because I don’t see as many of them as I used to. But there is another kind of content scraper that is starting to become more popular now. These content scrapers try to appear as if they’re not really scraping your content. They actually give you a link back - unless those old MFA guys who just stole your content with a lack of conscience.

The new scrapers take your content and put a link at the top of it out of the goodness of their hearts. At the bottom of your content (on their web pages, mind you), they link to another site that they own in hopes of selling services and products related to the keywords they are targeting with your hard work. Pretty clever, eh?

You can see a sample of this kind of content scraping on several of my past blog posts, but I’ll just link to this one and you can take a look at that first comment.

I love how Saskatoon Web Design just took my entire blog post. Sure, they gave attribution. I got the link back. They even included the internal links that were a part of my original post. All except the affiliate links (they must have scraped my content before I went back in and added those). But at the bottom of the blog post with the words that I wrote, you’ll see a link to the index page of the website on which the Rawk Media blog sits. Clever. These guys are trying to sell their services using content that I wrote, based on the keyword research that I’ve done. I suppose that works if you can’t write. But it does violate existing copyright laws. If they’re not careful, someone may report them to their ISP.

Category: Content Development, Robots

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