Ban Scraper Directories?

[keyplyr]

Lately, I've found dozens upon dozens of these so called directories linking to my site. You know the type I'm talking about - Adsense on top and both sides, followed by a 6 or 8 other advertisers, then the top 20 Google, or DMOZ listings for the topic.

I was banning them for a while but my .htaccess was growing at a rate that I'm now questioning whether it's worth the effort. Most of these sites are new with PR0, but a few have gained a competitive PR and SERP placement, no doubt from my (and everyone elses) keyword rich site descriptions.

I've even found one site that has developed software which boasts the ability to create these directories in a matter of minutes!

Is this something that we, as webmasters, should be uniting against? Can we really do anything? Is banning referrers/host_IPs effective? Or is that just stopping a legit user from clicking through?

[mack]

I always say if it links to you leave it. An inbound can't hurt. If they have you listed and you block them all you do is stop users clicking through. The link really can't do you any harm.

Mack.

[jomaxx]

I don't think banning them is an option. The best a .htaccess file could do is ban visitors coming from that site, which seems kind of self-defeating.

[martinibuster]

A lot of these scrapers are pretty targeted. As far as web traffic goes, it's pretty good. Bring them on, I say.

[incrediBILL]

When I catch them scraping I block their IP, not the web surfers. Nothing I can do about someone building a directory, but there is something I can do about some idiot downloading thousands of my pages and I do it all the time.