An Example of Blog Scraping

I have been witnessing Blog Scraping on my blog for a while. The easiest way to spot it is when you see incoming links from your wordpress dashboard and you visit the websites that are linking to you and you find your blog post, but with a completely different name as the author.

From the image above, you can see three different examples of blog scraping, where someone has published excerpts from my blog posts and used different names as the author.

The first one is supposed to be published by glossarist, the second one is supposed to be published by unknown, and the third one is supposed to be published by Shawn Collins. Well, the real author is me.

If they are using Blog Scraping and copying my content, why can’t they at least use my real name? It would all look a lot more legit if they did. The only problem might be that their blog scraping software can’t save the name of the author (I really don’t know the answer, but I am guessing that’s it).

What is Blog Scraping?

From what I have read at Wikipedia, blog scraping is

the process where automated software scans hundreds of thousands of blogs per day, searching for and copying content.

Why are they copying the content and publishing it?

Well, I think that it might have to do with two things: trackbacks and search engines. Usually when people link back to a blog post, they get trackbacks and as a results they might receive traffic from the original blog post. And sometimes search engines might pick up their content (even though it’s not their content) and they may get a few extra hits to their websites.

Is blog scraping all bad?

They are copying your content, but is it all bad? At least they are linking back to your blog post.

The only problem with the link back to your blog post is that you will never get any traffic from the link, and the blog that are linking to it doesn’t have any authority at all. So, the link is not worth much when it comes to traffic. But like any other blog, you can receive visitors from blogs that have copied your content.

At first Blog Scraping seems like a rather harmless thing, but when organized and large websites starts doing it, then we might have to start worrying and thinking about a way to fight it.