What is a skyscraper site

[jaames]

I've heard this term on this board alot and apparently google frown upon it.

can someone explain or give example please of what it is or meant, so i know it and avoid it?

Thanks

[ken_b]

It's scraper, not skyscraper. It's a site that scrapes (copies) content from other sites and posts it on the scraper site.

If Google frowns on this or not is open to question. But it seems like most publishers here are not very happy with scrapers.

[inbound]

Incidentally, skyscraper is a term used for tall banner ads.

We all hate scraper sites, it's more than a little annoying to find content that you've spent months writing being used by someone in a country that you have no effective legal recourse in. Google (and others) need to clean up their acts on this.

[mzanzig]

And then there are a few "skyscraper sites" as well. I had to deal with them a while ago. They are a handfull forums - huge forums! - dealing with "architecture and landscape photos", basically inviting their members to steal images and bandwidth from web sites without giving credit or anything. They are among the worst copyright infringers I've ever met - and they can steal your bandwidth really fast. One guy hotlinked twenty high-res images into one forum post, stealing 1.6 MB with each opening of the post (of course, giving no credit)!

But enough of that rant.

You probably mean indeed scraper sites as explained before. ;-)

[dollarshort]

Scraping is a programmer's term where data is gathered from non convetional sources such as, such as screens (screen scraper), in this case html is scraped from the output of a search engine usally by using (regular expressions) to parse it into html so you can build a hundred page keyword rich (but useless) website in minutes.

[Rodney]

There are also several threads from this forum asking a similar question [google.com] (with many detailed answers)