Scrapers are a part of the internet, so rather than get angry, I get even. A scraper site is a web site that copies content of other sites and republishes them as their own content. I actually don’t have a problem as long as the scraper site leaves links intact, so it links back to my site.
The other day I was checking a blog of mine on http://copyscape.com. Copyscape can check if your blog is being scraped amongst other things. It has a limited free service, otherwise the full service is 5c a search.
My blog was being scraped, by about 50 times in fact. But one site was removing links, and they actually out ranked me for one of my original articles. That is when I searched for the title of my post, they were listed number one in google, and my site was hidden from the search result behind the “repeat the search with the omitted results included” link.
That’s just not cricket. I went to the article that was outranking mine, and they were running adsense ads on it, I clicked the “ads by google” link and made a complaint about copyright infringing content on their site. I got an email from google telling me how to send them a DCMA take down request, which I didn’t bother doing. It requires faxing, too hard.
I then went back to the search result page from google and clicked the “Dissatisfied? Help us improve” link and complained that google were ranking a scraper site ahead of mine.
Then I went to delicious and made a few bookmarks back to my article. A few days later, my article is number one in google when searching for the title, and the scraper site is buried deep down in the results. Job done, feeling satisfied.
I would hope google will eventually check the scraper site out and close their adsense account, but if the scraper site is making money for google, I don’t see the incentive.