What Is Scraper Sites In SEO?

Scraper sites are considered as one of the many modern techniques used in Black Hat SEO. According to many SEO Philippines consultants, the use of scraper sites in the last few years have proliferated at an amazing rate for spamming search engines. So what is a scraper site? And how does it affect search engines that many have come to eliminate these types of websites?

What is a Scraper Site?
Scraper sites are commonly known in industry as Made for AdSense or MFA sites. This is because these kinds of websites are created for the sole purpose of monetizing the site using advertising programs, which in this case AdSense. This is also a derogatory term used to refer to websites that have no redeeming value except to get web visitors to the website for the sole purpose of clicking on advertisements. So how does this work?

According to many SEO Philippines consultants, a scraper site is a type of website that copies all of its content from other websites using web scraping. Web scraping is a computer software technique of extracting information from other websites, such as search engines. 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. However, other types of scraper sites are built for the sole of monetizing it.

Made for AdSense sites are considered sites that are spamming search engines and diluting the search results by providing surfers with less-than-satisfactory search results. The scraped content is considered redundant to that which would be shown by the search engine under normal circumstances had no MFA website been found in the listings.

Legality
Scraper sites have also been considered illegal for it violates 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.

Methods For Eliminating Scraper Sites
According to many SEO Philippines consultants, these types of websites are currently being eliminated in various search engines and sometimes show up as supplemental results instead of being displayed in the initial search results. Another way Google and Yahoo are combating the proliferation of arbitrage are through quality scoring systems. For example, in Google's case, Adwords penalizes "low quality" advertiser pages by placing a higher per click value to its campaigns. This effectively evaporates the arbitrager's profit margin. Visit http://www.myoptimind.com for more info.