When you develop and post unique content on your website and someone links to it, that’s great! That’s exactly what you want to happen. You want your content to be remarkable so others will link to it, however not all webmasters like to play by the rules.
What if someone posts your content on another website and that other website ranks above yours on searches related to that duplicate content?
Content Scraping
What exactly is Content Scraping? According to Techopedia, “Content scraping is an illegal way of stealing original content from a legitimate website and posting the stolen content to another site without the knowledge or permission of the content’s owner. Content scrapers often attempt to pass off stolen content as their own, and fail to provide attribution to the content’s owners.” In other words it’s stealing, plagiarism or the word used by Matt Cutts, head of Google’s webspam team, it is spam.
Report Duplicate Content to Google
Content scraping to produce duplicate content online is considered spam and Google wants to know about it. On February 21, Matt Cutts, tweeted the link to this Google Scraper Report. It can’t hurt to file a report if someone outranks you with your own content. This report can especially help bloggers, because bloggers don’t usually have the means to launch a costly legal attack. This new tool might finally give the little guys content a chance in the rankings and slow down the practice of content scraping.
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