I was studying my analytics today and saw a new referrer to one of my posts. Naturally I visited it to see who it was who was kind enough to send me the traffic.
But then I realised that the site is some kind of (automated? must be?!) content scraping site. All the posts follow an identical format: a brief (but normally ridiculous) introduction; a scrape of someone elses content (mine in this case); and a source with a link back to the original post (no rel="nofollow", interestingly).
Here's the introduction to their post that they scraped from my blog:
"I’ve a passion for Telephones and keep looking for good articles. Today, I checked if I could find more info by entering ‘adsense blogging’ in Google and found this:"
Of course, the site as Google Adsense all over it and is designed to pull visitors in (thanks to other hard-working bloggers' content) and earn from Adsense clicks.
Surely this type of site can't earn the guys running it anything? If it does...it shouldn't! What value is it adding to the world? Despite them sending me traffic and inbound links, I can't help feeling like they're stealing other peoples' content for their own benefit.
What do you think?
9 comments:
at least this one isn´t scraping your content without an introduction or link back. That´s even worse to my opinion.
It can be frustrating to find. As for whether anyone's earning off it, well if you're syndicating various feeds, it may give the diversity needed to pull visitors in via search engines. Because they won't realise it's a scraper site they may stay and read or click an ad.
Whilst one site may not make much, most of these site owners are creating hundreds of sites that are similar in idea. $1 a day per site, makes $36k a year ;)
@blogearners - yes, that's true. I guess there's a silver lining to every cloud!
@sarahg - I guess thanks to the lack of a rel=nofollow I might get something positive out of it. The models and lengths some people go to when trying to make money online is amazing. Did you read my post on who earns what? I mentioned weddingshoes.com's owner - that site is another example of a site that makes $ out of adsense with very little 'real' content. Amazing.
Thanks both for stopping by and commenting :)
It's even more frustrating when that site ranks higher for YOUR content than you do :(
You might want to take a look how things can be done that way. There is always a fine line HOW YOU DO IT, though... http://www.BuryAdsense.com
Ah, gosh. It never ceases to amaze me the things people do in the web publishing world.
This kind of thing has yet to happen to me, but I'm sure it will happen soon enough.
@ses5909 - For sure!! Just gives you a goal though to up the SEO stakes!
@buryadsense - Jeeez...I learn something every day. I guess it must be working for you
@deron - There's always someone out there trying to manipulate the tools available for their own quick-win. Call me old fashioned, but I think (and I'm sure you agree) it's important to add value to the world, not just take from it.
You're definitely right. I do agree. I think you need to give before you can receive a lot of times.
I recently found my site on one of these things too, thing is my blog wasn't really even started yet it was in the middle of a redesign.
I hope these things dont spring up everywhere they are really annoying when your trying to search for important info.
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