What is Scraped Content?
Scraped content (content scraping, web scraping, and data scraping) refers to content taken from one site and republished on another site without the author or publisher’s permission. The content may be manually copied or done automatically using scraper bots.
Scraping content is controversial, as it often raises legal and ethical concerns about plagiarism, copyright infringement, and the unauthorized use of proprietary information.
Scraping content without the publisher’s permission and reusing it is plagiarism. It is unethical and against search engine guidelines. Scraped content can negatively impact SEO as search engines prioritize original and unique content over stolen or duplicate content.
Scraped content is called such because it is copied from the original site using scraping software. The scraping software visits the target webpage and crawls it to extract the content. Once done, it stores it in a database, from which it is then republished.
Importance of Scraped Content
Scraped content has no benefits to SEO. It is a black hat SEO technique and violates Basisbeginselen van Google Zoeken spam policies. It is controversial and considered unethical. It may also be illegal in certain regions.
Scraped content, even if it has been edited, is considered plagiarism and could get Google to issue you a manual action penalty. When that happens, Google will demote your site and may even remove it from search results pages.
Some sites may also scrape the website code. In this case, they use it to create a fake site that mimics the original site as part of a search engine poisoning campaign.
However, multiple black hat bloggers continue to use scraped content to increase the content and webpages on their sites. Scraped content allows them to publish new content to their sites within a few seconds rather than creating the content, which will take considerable time to create and publish.
With that said, some bloggers and marketers may have ethical reasons for scraping a site. In this case, the content is crawled and scraped but not republished by the publisher. Instead, it is used for other non-SEO purposes.
For instance, it is helpful for academic and marketing research, price comparison, SEO analysis, lead generation, trends monitoring, and competitive analysis.
How Content Scrapers Work
Content scrapers use software called web crawlers or bots to extract data from websites. These tools send HTTP requests to servers, just as a regular web browser would.
Once the server returns an HTTP response code and content, the scraper analyzes the webpage’s HTML code and extracts the content and elements it needs before storing them in a database or spreadsheet.
Some scraper bots are also advanced enough to fill in details required by a site. This allows them to access gated content that requires visitors to enter their email addresses or log in details before accessing content.
Other Types of Scraping
Scraped content is usually used when referring to content scraped from one site and republished on another. However, web scrapers can scrape other types of content for ethical purposes, including:
1 Contacten
Web scrapers can scrape sites for names, addresses, phone numbers, and emails as part of a lead generation campaign. This is usually helpful for marketing purposes.
2 Product Descriptions
Web scrapers can scrape product descriptions as part of keyword analysis or marketing research into a product or ecommerce site. The scrapers may also scrape reviews and ratings as part of the market research.
3 Prijzen
Some ecommerce sites scrape prices from multiple sites and then use that to adjust their prices. Some comparison sites may also scrape prices from multiple sites and present them to visitors looking to compare prices.