Scraper site

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A scraper site is a website that copies content from other websites using web scraping. The content is then mirrored with the goal of creating revenue, usually through advertising and sometimes by selling user data.

Contents

Scraper sites come in various forms: Some provide little if any material or information and are intended to obtain user information such as e-mail addresses to be targeted for spam e-mail. Price aggregation and shopping sites access multiple listings of a product and allow a user to rapidly compare the prices.

Examples of scraper websites

Search engines such as Google could be considered a type of scraper site. Search engines gather content from other websites, save it in their own databases, index it and present the scraped content to the search engines' own users. The majority of content scraped by search engines is copyrighted. [1]

The scraping technique has been used on various dating websites as well. These sites often combine their scraping activities with facial recognition. [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8] [9] [10] [11] [ excessive citations ]

Scraping is also used on general image analysis (recognition) websites, as well as websites specifically made to identify images of crops with pests and diseases. [12] [13]

Made for advertising

Some scraper sites are created to make money by using advertising programs. In such case, they are called Made for AdSense sites or MFA. This derogatory term refers to websites that have no redeeming value except to lure visitors to the website for the sole purpose of clicking on advertisements. [14]

Made for AdSense sites are considered search engine spam that dilute the search results with less-than-satisfactory search results. The scraped content is redundant compared to content shown by the search engine under normal circumstances, had no MFA website been found in the listings.

Some scraper sites link to other sites in order to improve their search engine ranking through a private blog network. Prior to Google's update to its search algorithm known as Panda, a type of scraper site known as an auto blog was quite common among black-hat marketers who used a method known as spamdexing.

Legality

Scraper sites may violate 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) [15] and Creative Commons ShareAlike (CC-BY-SA) [16] licenses used on Wikipedia [17] require that a republisher of Wikipedia inform its readers of the conditions on these licenses, and give credit to the original author.

Techniques

Depending upon the objective of a scraper, the methods in which websites are targeted differ. For example, sites with large amounts of content such as airlines, consumer electronics, department stores, etc. might be routinely targeted by their competition just to stay abreast of pricing information.

Another type of scraper will pull snippets and text from websites that rank high for keywords they have targeted. This way they hope to rank highly in the search engine results pages (SERPs), piggybacking on the original page's page rank. RSS feeds are vulnerable to scrapers.

Other scraper sites consist of advertisements and paragraphs of words randomly selected from a dictionary. Often a visitor will click on a pay-per-click advertisement on such site because it is the only comprehensible text on the page. Operators of these scraper sites gain financially from these clicks. Advertising networks claim to be constantly working to remove these sites from their programs, although these networks benefit directly from the clicks generated at this kind of site. From the advertisers' point of view, the networks don't seem to be making enough effort to stop this problem.

Scrapers tend to be associated with link farms and are sometimes perceived as the same thing, when multiple scrapers link to the same target site. A frequent target victim site might be accused of link-farm participation, due to the artificial pattern of incoming links to a victim website, linked from multiple scraper sites.

Domain hijacking

Some programmers who create scraper sites may purchase a recently expired domain name to reuse its SEO power in Google. Whole businesses focus on understanding all[ citation needed ] expired domains and utilising them for their historical ranking ability exist. Doing so will allow SEOs to utilize the already-established backlinks to the domain name. Some spammers may try to match the topic of the expired site or copy the existing content from the Internet Archive to maintain the authenticity of the site so that the backlinks don't drop. For example, an expired website about a photographer may be re-registered to create a site about photography tips or use the domain name in their private blog network to power their own photography site.

Services at some expired domain name registration agents provide both the facility to find these expired domains and to gather the HTML that the domain name used to have on its web site.[ citation needed ]

See also

Related Research Articles

Spamdexing is the deliberate manipulation of search engine indexes. It involves a number of methods, such as link building and repeating unrelated phrases, to manipulate the relevance or prominence of resources indexed in a manner inconsistent with the purpose of the indexing system.

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the quality and quantity of website traffic to a website or a web page from search engines. SEO targets unpaid traffic rather than direct traffic or paid traffic. Unpaid traffic may originate from different kinds of searches, including image search, video search, academic search, news search, and industry-specific vertical search engines.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Link farm</span> Group of websites that link to each other

On the World Wide Web, a link farm is any group of websites that all hyperlink to other sites in the group for the purpose of increasing SEO rankings. In graph theoretic terms, a link farm is a clique. Although some link farms can be created by hand, most are created through automated programs and services. A link farm is a form of spamming the index of a web search engine. Other link exchange systems are designed to allow individual websites to selectively exchange links with other relevant websites, and are not considered a form of spamdexing.

Spam in blogs is a form of spamdexing which utilizes internet sites which allow content to be publicly posted, in order to artificially inflate their website ranking by linking back to their web pages. Backlink helps search algorithms determine the popularity of a web page, which plays a major role for search engines like Google and Microsoft Bing to decide a web page ranking on a certain search query. This helps the spammer's website to list ahead of other sites for certain searches, which helps them to increase the number of visitors to their website.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Metasearch engine</span> Online information retrieval tool

A metasearch engine is an online information retrieval tool that uses the data of a web search engine to produce its own results. Metasearch engines take input from a user and immediately query search engines for results. Sufficient data is gathered, ranked, and presented to the users.

A backlink is a link from some other website to that web resource. A web resource may be a website, web page, or web directory.

URL redirection, also called URL forwarding, is a World Wide Web technique for making a web page available under more than one URL address. When a web browser attempts to open a URL that has been redirected, a page with a different URL is opened. Similarly, domain redirection or domain forwarding is when all pages in a URL domain are redirected to a different domain, as when wikipedia.com and wikipedia.net are automatically redirected to wikipedia.org.

b2evolution

b2evolution is a content and community management system written in PHP and backed by a MySQL database. It is distributed as free software under the GNU General Public License.

Google AdSense is a program run by Google through which website publishers in the Google Network of content sites serve text, images, video, or interactive media advertisements that are targeted to the site content and audience. These advertisements are administered, sorted, and maintained by Google. They can generate revenue on either a per-click or per-impression basis. Google beta-tested a cost-per-action service, but discontinued it in October 2008 in favor of a DoubleClick offering. In Q1 2014, Google earned US$3.4 billion, or 22% of total revenue, through Google AdSense. AdSense is a participant in the AdChoices program, so AdSense ads typically include the triangle-shaped AdChoices icon. This program also operates on HTTP cookies. In 2021, over 38.3 million websites use AdSense.

Keyword stuffing is a search engine optimization (SEO) technique, considered webspam or spamdexing, in which keywords are loaded into a web page's meta tags, visible content, or backlink anchor text in an attempt to gain an unfair rank advantage in search engines. Keyword stuffing may lead to a website being temporarily or permanently banned or penalized on major search engines. The repetition of words in meta tags may explain why many search engines no longer use these tags. Nowadays, search engines focus more on the content that is unique, comprehensive, relevant, and helpful that overall makes the quality better which makes keyword stuffing useless, but it is still practiced by many webmasters.

A spam blog, also known as an auto blog or the neologism splog, is a blog which the author uses to promote affiliated websites, to increase the search engine rankings of associated sites or to simply sell links/ads.

Web scraping, web harvesting, or web data extraction is data scraping used for extracting data from websites. Web scraping software may directly access the World Wide Web using the Hypertext Transfer Protocol or a web browser. While web scraping can be done manually by a software user, the term typically refers to automated processes implemented using a bot or web crawler. It is a form of copying in which specific data is gathered and copied from the web, typically into a central local database or spreadsheet, for later retrieval or analysis.

The Sandbox effect is a theory about the way Google ranks web pages in its index. It is the subject of much debate—its existence has been written about since 2004, but not confirmed, with several statements to the contrary.

nofollow is a setting on a web page hyperlink that directs search engines not to use the link for page ranking calculations. It is specified in the page as a type of link relation; that is: <a rel="nofollow" ...>. Because search engines often calculate a site's importance according to the number of hyperlinks from other sites, the nofollow setting allows website authors to indicate that the presence of a link is not an endorsement of the target site's importance.

A search engine results page (SERP) is a webpage that is displayed by a search engine in response to a query by a user. The main component of a SERP is the listing of results that are returned by the search engine in response to a keyword query.

Blog scraping is the process of scanning through a large number of blogs, usually through the use of automated software, searching for and copying content. The software and the individuals who run the software are sometimes referred to as blog scrapers.

In the field of search engine optimization (SEO), link building describes actions aimed at increasing the number and quality of inbound links to a webpage with the goal of increasing the search engine rankings of that page or website. Briefly, link building is the process of establishing relevant hyperlinks to a website from external sites. Link building can increase the number of high-quality links pointing to a website, in turn increasing the likelihood of the website ranking highly in search engine results. Link building is also a proven marketing tactic for increasing brand awareness.

A content farm or content mill is a company that employs large numbers of freelance writers or uses automated tools to generate a large amount of textual web content which is specifically designed to satisfy algorithms for maximal retrieval by search engines, known as SEO. Their main goal is to generate advertising revenue through attracting reader page views, as first exposed in the context of social spam.

blekko Web search engine

Blekko, trademarked as blekko (lowercase), was a company that provided a web search engine with the stated goal of providing better search results than those offered by Google Search, with results gathered from a set of 3 billion trusted webpages and excluding such sites as content farms. The company's site, launched to the public on November 1, 2010, used slashtags to provide results for common searches. Blekko also offered a downloadable search bar. It was acquired by IBM in March 2015, and the service was discontinued.

Search engine scraping is the process of harvesting URLs, descriptions, or other information from search engines. This is a specific form of screen scraping or web scraping dedicated to search engines only.

References

  1. Google 'illegally took content from Amazon, Yelp, TripAdvisor,' report finds
  2. "This App Lets You Find People On Tinder Who Look Like Celebrities". BuzzFeed News . 20 June 2017. Archived from the original on 2023-05-08.
  3. Dating app boss sees ‘no problem’ on face-matching without consent
  4. Dating.ai App Matches You With Celebrity Look-alikes
  5. Facial recognition app matches strangers to online profiles
  6. NameTag: Facial recognition app criticized as creepy and invasive
  7. Swipe Buster
  8. Stalker-friendly app, NameTag, uses facial recognition to look you up online
  9. This Smart (but Unsettling) App Lets You Point Your Phone at People to Find Out Who They Are
  10. Truly.am Uses Facial Recognition To Help You Verify Your Online Dates
  11. 3 Fascinating Search Engines That Search for Faces
  12. "Wolfram has created a website that will identify any image you throw at it". The Verge . 2015-05-14. Archived from the original on 2023-06-03.
  13. Machine Learning Helps Small Farmers Identify Plant Pests And Diseases
  14. Made for AdSense
  15. "Text of the GNU Free Documentation License".
  16. "Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License".
  17. "Wikipedia:Reusing Wikipedia content".