What Is A Scraper Site? – The Semalt Answer
A scraper site is the website that copies the content from other blogs and websites using some web scraping techniques. This content is mirrored with the aim of generating revenues, either via advertising or by selling the user data. Various scraper sites differ by forms and types, ranging from spam content websites to the price aggregation and shopping outlets on the internet.
Different search engines especially Google can be considered as the scraper sites. They collect content from multiple websites, save it in a database, index and present the extracted or scraped content to the users on the internet. In fact, most of the content scraped or extracted by the search engines has been copyrighted.
Made for advertising:
Some of the scraper sites are created to make money online using different advertising programs. In such circumstances, they are named as Made for AdSense websites or MFA. The derogatory term refers to the sites that don't have any redeeming value expect to attract, lure and engage the visitors to the specified websites for getting clicks on advertisements. The Made for AdSense websites and blogs are considered as the powerful search engine spam. They dilute the search results with the less-than-satisfactory results. Some scraper sites are known to link to other websites and aim to improve the search engine ranking via the private blog networks. Before Google updated its search algorithms, different types of scraper sites used to be famous among black hat SEO experts and marketers. They used this information for spamdexing and performed a variety of functions.
Legality:
The scraper sites are known to violate the copyright laws. Even taking the content from the open source sites is the copyright violation, if done in the way that does not respect any license. For example, the GNU Free Documentation License and Creative Commons ShareAlike licenses were used on Wikipedia and required that the re-publisher of Wikipedia had to inform the readers that the content was copied from the encyclopedia.
Techniques:
Techniques or methods in which the scraper websites are targeted vary from one source to another. For instance, websites with the large amount of data or content such as consumer electronics, airlines, and departmental stores, can be routinely targeted by the competitors. Their competitors want to stay informed about the current prices and market values of a brand. Another type of scraper pulls snippets and the text from sites that rank high for specific keywords. They tend to improve their rank on the search engine results page (SERP) and piggyback on the original web page's ranks. RSS feeds are also vulnerable to the scrapers. The scrapers are normally associated with the link farms and are perceived when a scraper site links to the same website again and again.
Domain hijacking:
The programmers who had created scraper sites may buy the expired domains to get them reused for SEO purposes. Such practice allows SEO experts utilize all the backlinks of that domain name. Some of the spammers try to match the topics of the expired sites and/or copy the entire content from its Internet Archive, maintaining the authenticity and visibility of that site. The hosting services often provide the facility to find the names of an expired domain, and the hackers or spammers use this information to develop their own websites.
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