Nothing really makes you feel like you’ve “made it” in the web biz than to see multiple scrapers trying to steal your site’s content. In a weird way, we all aspire to be ripped off – because that means someone really wishes they had come up with whatever it is they’re ripping off. You made it, but they want it. They want credit for it too, and that’s probably because they’ve never made anything that good on their own.
So I don’t even get angry at these scrapers. I usually just check to make sure I outrank them for any snippet of my content, and then continue to ignore their useless efforts. I think I actually pity them because I don’t know if they’re capable of creating anything of actual value.
It was actually through an affiliate program that I discovered this particular scraper.
I was wondering why I was getting a burst of clicks. It was as if I had published a bunch of new pages because the crawlers were hitting all sorts of different links and URLs.
After a bit of digging through the data, I realized that someone had published a bunch of pages recently. They were ripping them straight out of a blog, and they hadn’t even bothered to put their own affiliate links in. Every lead that came through “their” domain, was actually being credited to my bank account.
A quick search on Google confirmed that I did indeed outrank him for any of the key phrases he was trying to claim, so I’m left to wonder: Should I even care?
Should I waste time out of my busy life to make legal threats at his hosting provider? I have a free employee, publishing my affiliate ID all over the web and even linking back to me with every internal link I make.
Heck, its like free dofollow RSS distribution. That’s a great way to get links, but there’s only so many choices and most places don’t actively promote your feed like this guy does.
I probably should be mad, but I’m kind of hoping I pick up more scrapers like this guy.
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