Why You Should Steer Clear of Scraped Content
I work as a freelance SEO consultant. Some days ago, I got a call from a blogger with an entire network of blogs. All of them were doing quite good before the 13th of October, but suddenly the traffic dropped drastically and he wanted me to do some link building and get their ranks back on track. When I sat down to have a look at the blogs, I wasn’t surprised at all to see that almost all posts were picked from different sources with minimalistic rephrasing. I called them back and told that you should consider yourself lucky to be able to get traffic and some income without moving a muscle up till now; instead of frowning upon the decline in traffic and earnings, and that I wouldn’t advise them to waste their resources on off-site optimization when the websites have nothing but copied content.
It’s amazing to see people complaining about the injustice prevailing over the Internet when their website is penalized. They will get a domain, spend less than half an hour on daily basis to copy and paste content from other domains (or even worse use one of those applications to do the job) and then expect the traffic and riches to come by. And if it doesn’t happen, they will go on complaining, and complaining. Sweet, isn’t it?
If you haven’t already figured it out, I am totally against the notion of auto-blogs or blogs running on scrapped content. Here’s why …
To begin with, that’s not blogging:
Blogs were meant to be a place where bloggers are supposed to write their own opinions or thoughts, what we actually see in the majority of those blogs is mere rephrasing or rewriting. That just spoils the purpose of having a blog. A blogger is supposed to write, no matter how good or bad, and not just copy and paste the content from other website, or even worse, use some plug-in to make it automatic.
Serve No Purpose for anybody:
A website that is relying solely on others content can at most be called a news aggregator that serves no purposes for anybody anymore. It used to be an easy but ridiculous way of earning money, but thanks to the Google Panda update, it has seized to be effective in that regard. Readers have much better options to get the news related to their favorite topics at one place (e.g. Google Reader). Not to mention that auto blogs or blogs that scrap the content from other resources are actually cheating the genuine writers and trying to earn by means of someone else’s content.
You don’t grow as a writer:
As I’ve earlier suggested, a blogger is supposed to write … no matter how good or bad it comes out to be. You might not get the accolades right from the word “go”, however, slowly but surely, your writing will improve. On top of all, you might get some earnings out of scrapped content (that too for a short period, because Google Panda will catch up sooner than later) but you will never get the recognition that a genuine blogger can get.
Web community frowns upon such websites:
Yes, everybody frowns upon such websites. To start with, the websites from where you’re copying your content from, they wouldn’t appreciate someone using their content to rank for certain keywords and earning, for obvious reasons. Second, search Engines are fed up of the websites adding nothing but spam to World Wide Web, and you will see more updates like Google Panda rolling out in the future to eradicate these websites from SERP. Last but not the least, web users are tired of reading the same old stuff at every other website, which makes it a lose-lose proposition for everybody involved.
This of course is besides the fact that Google penalizes sites with duplicate content and by scraping content you can potentially violate copyrights and risk having your site banned, shut down or your AdSense account banned if you AdSense enable a content scraping website.
Share your additional thoughts why content scraping is a bad idea, or if you have done it successfully why you are for it.
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"You don’t grow as a writer" Hear hear to that.. It's true that no one is born a writer. Writing indeed is a skill instead of a talent. I have to agree with you Arba, and the fact that I've been writing worst articles from the past few years could make me feel the sense of a little bit of accomplishment on my end.
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