Semalt: What Is Content Scraping? 4 Types Of Web Content That Is Scraped On The Net
Content scraping is the duplication of website content manually or through a number of tools. Most webmasters and bloggers protect their content under copyright laws, and posting stolen information as an original one is a serious crime!
Unfortunately, web content is mostly scraped for questionable and illegal purposes such as industrial espionage, plagiarism, and data theft. However, the legitimate and authentic purposes of content scraping are data entry, content management, data migration, competitive intelligence, reputation management or business analytics.
Four different types of content that are scraped on the internet:
Some webmasters and bloggers use content from reputable websites and blogs, considering that increasing the volume of pages on their sites is good for search engine rankings. And in fact, any content is susceptible to scraping, but four main types of scraped content are mentioned below.
1. Digital publishers and directories:
Digital publishers and online directories are often targeted by programmers and developers, who aim to scrape content from these platforms for their private blogs. Yell.com is such an example. This multinational internet service provider and online directory have gained tremendous success in recent months. A lot of content on this site has been scraped, and the spammers always look for the ways to scrape more of its pages. Similarly, Manta is the famous website where over 20 million brands have registered themselves for marketing purposes. Unfortunately, most of its content has been scraped, and a large number of bots are being used for this purpose.
2. Real estate:
Several years ago, the real estate agencies were attacked by the content scraper, and the recovering cost them more than 10 million dollars.
3. Travel:
It looks like the content of almost all travel portals has been scrapped. These companies not only provide information about best destinations in the world but also provide travel services to their customers. The travel sites are an easy target of content scrapers. Some of the leading online agencies that are at risk are Kayak, TripAdvisor, Priceline, Trivago, Expedia, and Hipmunk. They have built multibillion-dollar meta-search businesses, and their content is often scraped and reused on the small-sized websites and blogs.
4. E-commerce:
It's true that content of e-commerce site cannot be scraped easily, but the websites like eBay and Amazon are still scraped for pricing and production descriptions.
Post a comment
