For Adsense Dollars, Scraping Always Continues

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We’ve heard many initiatives over the years that have been aimed at removing ’scrapers’ from the Google SERPs. And generally events occur the same way. There’s a bit of ‘die-back’ as the scrapers are targeted and temporarily removed. But, since they’re run by resilient webmasters, they almost always find their way back.

Adsense scrapers make sense

Personally I’ve never built any Adsense scrapers, but I understand why someone would. Using RSS , PHP, and some MySQL, and you can have a website built quickly. It will also be ’somewhat useful’ to human users, and most importantly it will rank well because it’s designed with search engine friendliness in mind.

So for a minimum amount of effort, someone can built a relatively self-sustaining website that will update itself from news-driven sources and will stay near the top on related terms. If the website is constructed carefully and has enough incoming links, it should work for quite some time. For this reason alone, there’s always going to be people in this industry.

I don’t get worked up when I see these sites. I figure that I should be able to beat sites like this always. If Google is doing their job at all, they’ll be able to recognize the difference between a website done by hand and one manufactured to post from existing content. Let them figure it out.

Adsense is a particularly attractive platform for scraper website, because the ad targeting is done so well. If you can create a page, Google invariably will display deep and targeted inventory. For someone who can automate this page creation, the numbers can add up quickly.

I have no idea if these types of websites will always be working, but it does seem like they survive through the years and evolve, just like any other website. In the end, the ones that are most useful to end users will probably evolve and shed the negative connotations of being a scraper.

Do you get bugged by scraper websites?

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