Can Scraper Sites Hurt Your Google Rankings

[experienced]

there are thousand of online scripts and scraper might be visiting your website, and they must be taking your main content and title meta tags and description and all to make a link to your site from their worst website they are planning to put the ads or banners or something.

i have been experiencing this with one of my site. when i search for my home page content, i found many sites using my home page content submitted in article pages, in many sites using for linking me back with my title and content and all placed ads on those pages and all.

i tried contact those site owners but they are no where. Do you think these kind of scraper sites can hurt Google rankings.

These scrap sites are very huge in number for being contacted and asking them to remove and all those legal copyright statement to them. This would be very difficult to anyone to protect his site from this. If this continues webmaster will simply be spending their most of time in checking if somebody have taken their content or it is clear.

I believe this should be the Goog task to not to list those duplicate sites or those MFA sites who actually doing this to make money with no efforts or those who made these kind of sites just to demote their competitors by indexing or listing them on bad neighbor.

Any comments…….

[Shaddows]

I believe this should be the Goog task to not to list those duplicate sites or those MFA sites who actually doing this to make money with no efforts or those who made these kind of sites just to demote their competitors by indexing or listing them on bad neighbor.

Why?

Tinfoil time: from G's POV, they want traffic to MFA- they get paid for it.

To be fair, G does make an effort to list the original author, but sometimes it goes to the highest-PR site rather than the oldest.

I don't think its hurting your rankings. As long as you're not the victim of the dup content filter, you should be fine.

If you find some scapers are out-ranking you, I'd report those ones to G, plus use the Big Technique of G ranking- get more backlinks!

[Marcia]

I believe they can, and if so, it represents a flaw/hole in the algo. I believe it because I've seen it happen to a site.

Added: The opinion is not based on just one; I've seen it with more than one, but one case is particularly unmistakable.

[edited by: Marcia at 9:56 am (utc) on Mar. 18, 2009]

[JS_Harris]

If you check your rankings daily, absolutely.

If you concentrate on building the best quality you can and don't check more than once or twice a month... no, they can't.

My point is that anything another site can do to your rankings will be temporary at best, don't waste too much effort trying to tell Google how to index the net, they are aware of this type of thing. If a particular site concerns you file a spam notice in WMT.

Another tip is to set up a ping directly to the google blog search api instead of only to "ping-o-matic". Google gets the direct ping in real time but ping-o-matic is delayed. Let the other guy always have the delayed publish date.

[edited by: JS_Harris at 12:07 pm (utc) on Mar. 18, 2009]

[experienced]

for the MFA sites, which are using adsense, google has its policy for not to run the ads on those sites which are not good in terms of quality & content. so google should simply check those sites which are really extracting the search results of various engines or even from google and simply remove those sites from index. although google executives regularly check this but this is very diffecult for google to find and wipe out all of them quickly as billions of new comes every month..

on the other part for demoting a site, google never know, you are taking link on those sites or they are linking you themselves. I believe if that is a bad neighbor, you must be bearing the cost of it. we can report some sites to google but can not report 1000 of sites and if reporrted goog wil take time to investigate and till then you are gone.

we had a site ranking on top 3 position for the 60% of keywords around 300 keywords and suddenly some crabers hit the site, i saw thousand of sites having our urls and descriptions linked from there and its gone. i am still suffering since january for the site to recover...

[Shaddows]

Marcia, was this with non-new sites with a measurable PR and reasonably frequent crawling?

My employer gets scraped pretty frequently, but we rarely see the MFA/scraper site in the top 100 for any period of time.

However, we're ecom with alot of content, rather than pure informational. I'm pretty sure that ecom and info get treated in significantly different ways by the algo.

[experienced]

i can show you the millions of MFA in the top 10 for the highly competitive keywords but they have the real content and not cheating anybody. Scraper sites does not come in top rankings for sure. I am talking about those sites which are MFA and has no value at all. and you notice them when you check your content and your url used or something in google and then they appears.

[Sally Stitts]

A few days ago, I searched for a line of text in a post from a major webmaster forum (PR=6). The quoted text showed up on 3 websites, NOT ONE OF WHICH was the original.

I then tried several other quote-marked sentences, and the original did show up, AT THE BOTTOM. This was disturbing.

I think that one of the most important things that Google does, is keep track of the original. Luckily, they have done a good job with my stuff. If they didn't do well at this, can you imagine how much more of a "cesspool" (Google CEO quote) that the internet would be?

I applaud their efforts, for what must be a difficult task. I think that more emphasis should be given to the "time-stamp". First with the content, first in the SERPs. Devaluing the parasites is critical, IMHO.