Saturday, March 15, 2014

Has your artwork been scraped?

Google would like to know if:
  • your website or blog has been scraped of content (something that afflicts a lot of artists whose content is stolen)
  • the site that scraped your content now ranks higher than your site in Google (for the relevant keywords)
There's obviously some new initiative to improve the quality of responses to search queries and the algorithm which ranks websites and blogs. My guess is they're seeking to eliminate or de-index the worst offenders!

Google also got a brand new form where you can report when scraping your content has happened
Google Scraper Report

Another good way of tackling those who scrape content is to put your blog on a short feed. That way they can only ever scrape the feed.

4 comments:

  1. "scraping", This is new to me. One more thing we have to watch out for unfortunately.
    Now if Google could just figure out a way to block web crawling robots from our sites stats I would be happy.
    I made the unfortunate mistake of clicking on them from my stats page before I knew better. Now my stat page is totally worthless and inaccurate.
    The worst offender on my blog is from Starwood Hotels which lives on my blog 24 hours a day like a parasite.
    Oh well. ; (

    ReplyDelete
  2. What exactly is scraping? Excuse my ignorance on thr subject!

    ReplyDelete
  3. Scraper sites could waste most of your day if you let them. When you do reverse image searches to find infringements you quickly learn which of the search results may be scrapers. Scrapers can have viruses, malware, and spyware, as well as porn, pop ups you can't block, etc. I can't imagine that they have any other purpose than some money making criminal enterprise, using other people's property to do it. Site hosts sometimes boot them off entirely, if they're alerted to the site being a scraper.

    ReplyDelete
  4. If I see a scraper site I go straight for the Google report form and then report to their host.

    ReplyDelete

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