Article Scraping is Painful to You and Your Website

April 18, 2011 - You've probably never heard of article scraping, but if you've ever seen a bunch of similar articles with a few word changes, you've seen it in action.

The practice of article scraping is a blight on our quest for original content. It's an unethical and unfair practice used by many content farms to produce mass content packages on popular subjects. While most article scraping operations target article hubs like Ezine, ArticleBase, Suite101 and similar sites, there are plenty of other legitimate organic content authors that get scraped in the process, too.

Article scraping is when special software runs an article webpage through a filter that removes all identifying information from the text, leaving just the raw article and no information about the original author, website, etc. Next, to repurpose the article for your chosen keywords the program will often run a check for relevant places to put those keywords.

Say you're asking for an article on car accidents. The program will take the key phrase "car accident" and replace it with a synonym such as "vehicle crash." By replacing a few words and phrases in the article, article scrapers justify the resulting article as new content. The truth is, it's a scraped article and has the potential to drag down all other similar articles in search engine rankings.

What's this mean for you? Let's say you spend your time generating original content, or you enlist the help of a company like We Do Web Content that provides only organic, custom content to clients like you. Then you suddenly lose Google integrity because your content was scraped and repurposed on another website without your permission!

Article scraping is just as painful as hearing nails on a chalkboard!

It's a problem that Google has yet to address in its latest Panda update, but something that they are aware of. For now, all you can really do is continue to post good, unique content to your website, blogs, and social media and hope for the best. Some large article sites with verified organic content have filed complaints with Google, so time will tell when we see how they handle it.

When your business is looking for quality, custom content for your website, newsletters, and social media look no further than We Do Web Content. Having unique content on your website is a great way to increase search engine rankings and boost your Internet marketing. For affordable, quality content exclusive to YOUR website, blog and clients, contact us today!  1-888-521-3880.