Scraper Sites For Black Hat SEO

Search Engine Optimization or simply known as SEO is one of the many search engine marketing or SEM strategies used by web webmasters to increase the volume of traffic coming in directly from search engines including Yahoo!, Google, and MSN. Although SEO is a growing strategy, contraversies revolving the methods and techniques used in the strategy are growing as well. One of its most recent contraversial strategy is the use of scraper sites.

A scraper site is a website that copies all of its content from other websites using web scraping. Web scraping is a computer software technique of extracting information from websites. Usually, according to SEO Philippines specialists, such software programs simulate human exploration of the Web by either implementing low-level Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), or embedding certain full-fledged Web browsers, such as the Internet Explorer (IE) and the Mozilla Web browser.

No part of a scraper site is original. A search engine is not a scraper site: sites such as Yahoo and Google gather content from other websites and index it so that the index can be searched with keywords. Search engines then display snippets of the original site content in response to a user's search.

In the last few years, and due to the advent of the Google Adsense web advertising program, scraper sites have proliferated at an amazing rate for spamming search engines. According to SEO Philippines specialists, open content sites such as Wikipedia are a common source of material for scraper sites.

Techniques
Many scrapers will pull snippets and text from websites that rank high for keywords they have targeted. This way they hope to rank highly in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages). RSS feeds are vulnerable to scrapers. According to SEO Philippines specialists, scrapers tend to be associated with link farms and are sometimes perceived as the same thing, when multiple scrapers link to the same target site. A frequent target victim site might be accused of link-farm participation, due to the artificial pattern of incoming links to a victim website, linked from multiple scraper sites.

Legality
Scraper sites may violate copyright law. Even taking content from an open content site can be a copyright violation, if done in a way which does not respect the license. For instance, the GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL) and Creative Commons ShareAlike (CC-BY-SA) licenses require that a republisher inform readers of the license conditions, and give credit to the original author.

Margarette Mcbride is a copywriter of Optimind Web Design and SEO, a web design and seo company in the Philippines. Optimind specializes in building and promoting websites that are designed for conversion..