A scraper site is generated by a web crawler that takes content from various sites and feeds and are often created in order to generate ad revenue. Here it is from the horse’s mouth:

I really didn’t think that scraper sites worked, nor made money. Oh but they do! After 5 days of having 20 scraper sites launched and doing daily pings for them all I have been making some cash monies. Im up to about $2.50 a day. The crazy thing is that none of these sites have any backlinks, but some are ranking on page #1 on google for some really really good keywords. You will be amazed of the keywords if I showed you!

Now the guys that make a living off scraper sites make thousands and use automated server side programs to ping and get some backlinks for there scraper sites before they get banned by google. Which is usually 2 months. But I want to see if I can get my scraper sites in the SERPS for a long time, and keep building backlinks for them, so thats the next phase of my testing. Right now I have 20 sites and only about 5 are indexed, the rest should be soon. My goal is to get at least 50 backlinks too all of them using BH methods. Then maybe I can start making some decent cash from this.

There are many different forms of scrapers sites. Here are a few examples of what I mean:

• this could be an entire post, usually with no link to your site
• this could be a post with links to blog posts, they take a paragraph and link to your post
• this could be your entire site, over several pages, all tossed around like salad, could include links but generally will include links to other sites (this may be a case of someone trying to sabotage your site’s rankings)

Why do we hate scrapers so much?

Well, besides the obvious fact that scraper sites steal the content you took time and energy to generate, it could also lead to your content being devalued in the search engine rankings. These could come to be viewed as duplicate content, and though I doubt Seth Godin needs to worry about this, a newer blogger such as myself with a brand spanking new domain could end up ranking lower than a scraper site with an older domain if an entire post were to be taken. Actually, there is little doubt that that would be the case. So, they are a) morally repugnant b) personally offensive and c) screw with my rankings, so we hate them.

But why do we like scrapers?

Every time I write a post about internet marketing or search engine optimization and sometimes about Google too, I will get a few links from scraper sites that include a link to my blog. Sometimes the same link on a few different domains. Some people think that links from bad neighborhoods may hurt your site’s ranking, but I think so long as you don’t allow any pingbacks and link back to them, you are in the clear. I have never had a bad effect from a “bad link”. And until they provide me with any conclusive proof, I won’t say no to a link.

But what can we do about scrapers?

If your site or blog has been scraped and you do not want that site to continue to take your content, then I have found an easy enough solution for you on Jaime Sirovich’s SEO blog.