Scraper sites, what are they? Is your content being plagiarized? Find out here!

Scraper site are spam websites that copies from other websites content without permission using web scraping software.

Scraper sites are now increasing at an alarming rate and are even catching up on the search engine rankings of the original website. Open source content are normally the victims to this threat.

What are Scraper site made for? Why copy all the content from an open source and then re-post it in hopes of getting more traffic and higher rankings than the original websites?
The answer to this is very simple, they are made to make money through advertisements by chucking them to the website on every possible way. 


Scraper sites itself is illegal, or most of it as even if the content has been licensed a GNU Free Documentation License and Creative Commons ShareAlike. This doesn't mean they can just copy freely, they will need to include a link back to the author of the original post. If not that is illegal and legal threat can be carried out to take down the contents of the website. 
An example of a scraper site:

What sort of advertisement services will they normally use? Well normally they will use:

Infolinks (Ads that appear on links)

Google Adsense: (Both banners and text ads)

Chitika: (These normally run as alternatives to Google Adsense or with Google Adsense)

Adscend Media: (Usually the interstitial,  pop-up links or under pop-up links)

Domain Hijacking 

Another thing is that they will wait for existing domains to expire. There are a few places they can wait for expiring domains and once they expire, web scrapers will immediately jump and the chance to buy that domain, hoping that not only it can ride on it's coat tails and continue from where it left off but using the fame and rank that the domain name has achieved, they stand a higher chance of outlasting the original contents from which they copied from. This is also known as domain hijacking (Although I wouldn't really call that as they didn't actually "steal" it)

Some scraper sites also made use of free sub domains such as:

• Co.CC
• Co.Cu
• .blogspot
• .weebly
• .webs

To copy all their content from, thus degrading the quality and the name that these sub domains have acquired.

It is easy to check if your website has been scraped,here are a few places to check:

Feedburner

Feedburner flags every unusual activity on your feed and reports them to you on the Analyze tab. Check them occasionally for any unusual activity at your feed and the domain using your feed.

Google Webmaster Tools

Check for any site that is linking to your page. If you saw mass linkings from a particular website domain, visit it, it could be a scraper site.

If your blog that is on Blogspot and found that your contents has been scraped , you may report them to Google here: Click Here

If yours is not a blog but a website, you may report them here at these two places:

This is web pages for websites- Click Here

If the website is using Google Adsense- Click Here

It is alright if someone just copied a thing or two from you such as pictures so long as they are for educational purposes. No one will blame you or take much notice. However, if it is the entire content, (Not to mention the entire blog or website) it is time to make a complaint.

Well, that's all for Scraper sites, if you have any comments, feel free to drop one here. I'll love to hear from you!

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