SEO and scraper sites

One of the most annoying things for search engine optimisation professionals is other webmasters copying content from your site, without the owner’s permission or consent. The problem is due to the open source nature of the internet stealing content is very easy to do.
It’s the search engines job to deliver unique information to their users, if duplicate content exists on the internet the search engines have failed in their mission.

To combat this search engines such as Google have to choose which version of the content to index and rank in their listings. The page which is listed is usually the page which posted the content first, determined by the page’s creation date. This creation date however isn’t always reliable and Google can sometimes index the copied version not your original content, undoing all your hard work.

Websites which display content taken from various other sites are called "scraper sites".
These sites lift content from many other websites, and cause concern within the search engine optimisation professionals who don’t want other websites using their content.

Google does offer some solutions to try and help stop these scraper sites getting credit for your content.

For example If you have multiple URLs on your own site pointing to the same content, you can now inform Google which URL you would like the spiders to read, through Google sitemaps. It is however not guaranteed the bots will note the request. Another option would be to contact the webmaster threatening legal action due to breach of copyright. This will hopefully lead to the copied content being removed from the internet.

Adding a copyright protection emblem on your site can also deter potential content thieves. Although following these methods makes you more protected there is no guaranteed protection for your content. Google is looking into different methods to protect your content, and with the help of webmasters hopefully this issue will be resolved in the near future

Paul
SEO Programmer

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