Have you ever come across an article that looks a little to familiar?
This is a familiar problem across the web where a web thief has copied your own content and tried to pass it off as their own, or scrapers have taken the info from a page on your site and spun it so that it is similar but with poor grammar and often hard to read.
The real problem begins though when you realise that not only has your content been copied but it is outranking you in the search results for the same keywords.
Google, however, appears to have come up with a solution in the form of a new tool to beat the spammers and scammers.
The new ‘Google Scraper Report’ was recently announced by Google’s man of mystery and head of spam team Matt Cutts. Although this won’t provide an instant ‘live’ resolution or in fact, any fix problem solved at all it does look like the problem will be investigated. The Google Scraper Report just asks users to provide the original url and the url of the scaped content.
In most circumstances, this tool used in the correct manner should prove effective and help bring down the spammers. The only real problem being authentic owners of content being target by others if they already own the copyright.
It will be interesting to see what Google does with this data and if the sites with the scraped content will be devalued. Or will be Google using this tactic to help further evolve its already erratic algorithm?
