Scrapers Exceed Log Spammers

[willybfriendly]

Looking through my logs it appears that I am now getting more legit referrals from scraper sites than bogus referrals from the log spammers that are still going about their business. This is a first for me.

Maybe those scrapers aren't so bad after all. Traffic is traffic, and it must be at least semi-qualified if they have already clicked through one site to get to mine.

Now, if G would only give credit for all those links life would be good indeed...

WBF

[larryhatch]

Have a good look at the scraper's links. The number 302 rings in my ears. -Larry

[blend27]

WBF - Be carefully what you wish for... "…. THE authoritative page for a niche people will link to you". 302 and/or incorrect URI and so on, Guard your Kingdome my friend.

[willybfriendly]

No doubt many of these scraper sites are using 302's. I have seen a couple that are using every conceivable combination of " widget keyword" as page heading/title.

So far I have been fortunate in avoiding site hijackings, though I have seen one successful page hijack from one of my sites on a very obscure term from a very deep page.

The points I were making were, 1) scraper sites are becoming more prevalent than log spammers, and 2) scraper sites are producing a small but measurable increase in traffic.

Still, it would be nice if the scraper site problem would be taken care of by the SE's. From a user perspective it is a pain in the arse to do a search only to go to a site whose content is the very search results you just looked at in the SE.

Which raises an interesting paradox. Do scraper sites appear in their own scraped SERPS?

WBF

[blend27]

It’s funny, but they even scrape each other, I’ve seen a few, on Yahoo, definitely not interlinking trick, where 2 of them were in top 3, after a while one end up doing a simple dodo to the other, which got both thrown out to page 7.