Are scrapers who do not rank a problem? Are the links a benefit?

[graeme_p]

My site gets scraped quite a bit, but the majority of these are sites that appear nowhere in the SERPS for any term I can think of related to the pages they scrape. Most of my traffic is for obvious one and two word searches. Should I worry?

Most of my content have links to other pages on the site in the content. I good many scrapers retain these. Is that a benefit?

Then there are people, mostly bloggers or posters in forums, who copy without permission, but link back with proper attribution. Is that good?

[aristotle]

If other people copy your content, logically that's an indication of good quality, and therefore should be a positive signal. Whether Google treats it that way isn't clear.

I doubt if backlinks from inside the scraped content have much effect, but links from bloggers and forum posters might do some good.

The main potential problem would arise if Google didn't recoginze your site as the original source. So I think that's the main thing you need to watch for.

[graeme_p]

That is pretty much what I thought: it would be silly to penalise people for being copied and it ought to be a positive signal.

I have never found a scraper ranking, so I think Google has been recognising me as the original source very consistently.

[diberry]

I used to have scrapers that regularly ranked close to me on searches for which I'd been #1 for years. That made me nervous, so I sent DCMA complaints on them, and they're all toast now. I have to repeat this with new scrapers every few months. Google really does a poor job of this, especially compared to Bing, where I've never seen a scraper rank even halfway decently. Google just keeps letting people rank with my stolen content.

I also doubt Google takes scraping as a quality sign. Most scrapers grab whatever's at the top of Google, so it's not that they independently looked at your work and decided it was good. Google decided that already, and they're just trying to game the algo.

[incrediBILL]

It's the scrapers you can't easily find that are more of a threat IMO.

The scrapers that spin or scramble content just to rank for the same keywords and phrases are a real problem and very hard to find unless you embed tracking codes in your content.

The simplest solution is to be proactive and put a bot blocker on the site to preemptively stop the scraping before it happens, not chasing it later and trying to send DMCA requests after the fact. I probably have some of the best web defenses on my sites and still a few things get scraped now and then, it's inevitable, but it's a manageable problem vs. having to deal with a scraping and ranking epidemic.

[netmeg]

Too bad there isn't.... oh never mind.

[aristotle]

The scrapers that spin or scramble content just to rank for the same keywords and phrases are a real problem and very hard to find unless you embed tracking codes in your content.

The worst is when the scraper that does this is a wikipedia editor. I've written some articles that ranked number 1 for years, but then someone took most of their content and created a new wikipedia page out of it. Within a short time these wikipedia pages would take over the number 1 spot and begin taking most of the traffic .