Just like the anti-content farm blog posts previously, I'm half hoping that the internet community turns its attention to the problem of content scrapers (in the hope that Google take more action against the problem). I am a fan of Google - and the biggest source of traffic to my websites is Google search traffic - although the issue of scrapers does seem to be growing (even despite the attempted anti-scraper Google algorithm update earlier in the year).
A couple of days ago I did some searching online and found that a fair number of websites had copied some of my articles in their entirety. And sadly, a lot of these 'websites' were actually Google Blogger (Blogspot) blogs. And whilst some of these copied articles weren't appearing in Google search (I guess since the entire site contained copied/scraped content, thus giving them a Google SERP penalty?), some of the copied articles were appearing in the SERPs. And a couple of these websites even had Google AdSense on them.
So there was the crazy situation whereby my content had been stolen/scraped illegally, and put on a Google Blogger blog with Google Ads on it, and (in some cases) that blog then received traffic from Google Search. Hrmph.
In the interest of balance, I will point out that I filed Google DMCA requests after finding these scraped articles, and Google did promptly reply (a non-automated reply around 30 hours later, which is quick considering how many DMCAs Google must get).
They only removed the individual blog post (and not the blogs overall, even though they were clearly spam blogs), but nonetheless I am happy with Google's quick response.
I just wish that content scraping isn't (in some cases) a profitable endeavor..
Comments
Just like the anti-content farm blog posts previously, I'm half hoping that the internet community turns its attention to the problem of content scrapers (in the hope that Google take more action against the problem). I am a fan of Google - and the biggest source of traffic to my websites is Google search traffic - although the issue of scrapers does seem to be growing (even despite the attempted anti-scraper Google algorithm update earlier in the year).
A couple of days ago I did some searching online and found that a fair number of websites had copied some of my articles in their entirety. And sadly, a lot of these 'websites' were actually Google Blogger (Blogspot) blogs. And whilst some of these copied articles weren't appearing in Google search (I guess since the entire site contained copied/scraped content, thus giving them a Google SERP penalty?), some of the copied articles were appearing in the SERPs. And a couple of these websites even had Google AdSense on them.
So there was the crazy situation whereby my content had been stolen/scraped illegally, and put on a Google Blogger blog with Google Ads on it, and (in some cases) that blog then received traffic from Google Search. Hrmph.
In the interest of balance, I will point out that I filed Google DMCA requests after finding these scraped articles, and Google did promptly reply (a non-automated reply around 30 hours later, which is quick considering how many DMCAs Google must get).
They only removed the individual blog post (and not the blogs overall, even though they were clearly spam blogs), but nonetheless I am happy with Google's quick response.
I just wish that content scraping isn't (in some cases) a profitable endeavor..