Mar 19th, 2007
Scraping Content
For those of you who believe that scraping other site’s content and putting it on your site will help you rank well in the search engines, this post is for you. A recent post by Kaspar on the Official Google Webmaster Central Blog says that scraping content from other websites in an attempt to dupe the search engines is against Google’s webmaster guidelines and will get you penalized once your site is found - which usually doesn’t take too long.
Does this mean that if you’re scraping a small amount of relevant content that you will be penalized once the search engines find you? Not necessarily. Having scraped content that is relevant to your page and site is not a problem as long as there is unique content on the page as well. The search engines do pretty well at differentiating between a site that is attempting to fool the search engines with scraped content, and a site that has a bit of scraped content that is relevant to the users of that page. Just make sure you have other high quality content that is useful to your visitors.