Search Engine Optimization Scrapers: How Do You Deal With Them?
Writing by Nick Stamoulis on Tuesday, 18 of March , 2008 at 9:00 am
I like reading Kalena’s Dumbass of the Week blog posts. They’re always entertaining and usually feature a real dumbass - someone who is a dumbass and doesn’t know it type of dumbass. In her latest post, however, Kalena’s dumbass actually turns out to be a dumbass who finds out just how dumb he really is after being outed by the Dumbass Identifier Queen herself. I must admit, though, after reading through the soap opera-like tale that at one point I thought the dumbass schtick had backfired on Kalena, exposing her as the Dumbass of the Week.
The brouhaha started when Kalena used her blog to expose a scraper. The industry joke is that this usually leads to the scraper posting on their own site the negative exposure concerning their own unethical behavior. It’s been effective for other Search Engine Optimization folks in the past and Kalena was just doing what we all at some point have done. As planned, and right on cue, Kalena’s scraper did just what she expected him to do - he outed himself on his own blog. How sweet is the taste of victory!
But, wait … not so fast.
Kalena, of course, did a victory dance. Wouldn’t you? You can see it here:
Some days, I really love my job. Wouldn’t it be a hoot if they scraped this post too?
Then, the awful truth came out. The “scraper” turned out to be some junior Search Engine Optimization person (a student) who built a fictional company to see how quickly he could rank in the search engines. Well, who hasn’t done that? Every Search Engine Optimization expert in the world - if they’re a real Search Engine Optimization expert - has done these types of experiments (and this is where I thought the joke was on Kalena). Then it dawned on me: Search Engine Optimization folks create fictional companies and perform experiments to see what happens when they employ certain techniques, but they don’t usually do that with other people’s content. That is, real Search Engine Optimization gurus don’t engage in scraping just to see how successful scraping is. If they do then they are at least up front about it in another forum or blog so that real people aren’t injured by their experiments.
And this is where the frayed edges unraveled. Kalena’s Dumbass of the Week post was Sphinned. A discussion ensued, which led to the dumbass’s boss making a confession:
Hello, I have just been alerted to this. What a lovely start to a Tuesday Morning.
One of the lads in my department asked if he could use the domain name webpropeller for some seo tests he wanted to do. AS we have no plans at the moment for the domain I did not see a problem. It would now appear I have been very naive. Our core business is a web design company
I have not seen the amount of contnet that was scraped from the sites. he removed the content this morning in a panic from his home before I was called by him explaining what he has done.
All I can do is offer my sincere apologis to both Hobo SEO who he aparently stole his copy from (he’s certainly no copywriter) and Kalena and Tim nash who he was scraping content via a wordpress plug in.
The Contact email was being sent to myself, I don’t recall ever recieving an enquiry. If I did, I would have paid attention to what was actually on the site.
anyone have any Suggestions for his punishment please?
He is due in in 8 minutes.
So it seems that Kalena had the wrong dumbass after all. She should have written about the guy who wrote the above post at Sphinn.
What’s the lesson here? If you have a junior SEO working for your company, DO NOT turn him or her loose on a domain that you own. If they want to run test experiments on their own without your knowledge, they’ll have to buy their own domain names and suffer the consequences of their actions on their own.
Category: Content Development, SEO
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