It’s always frustrating for webmasters when they discover someone has scraped their content and is using it on another site. A bad situation can become even worse if the site using scraped content out ranks the originating site on searches related to the topic of the stolen article. For this reason, it is important that webmasters claim their content as quickly as possible, but the war against content theft is an eternal struggle and it is still quite common for webmasters to discover their original content is driving more traffic to competing sites than to the site it was stolen from. Fortunately Google has just released a new tool that may help make this a thing of the past. The name of this tool? The Google Scraper Report.
Yesterday Matt Cutts, head of Google’s web spam team, announced the arrival of the Google Scraper Report via his Twitter feed, stating . . .
“If you see a scraper URL outranking the original source of the content in Google, please tell us about it.”
The Google Scraper Report is a simple tool, powered by Google Drive, that provides webmasters with a chance of rectifying the damage caused by stolen content. Webmasters need only input the URL of their original content, followed by the URL of the scraped content and the URL of the search results that rank the scraped content higher than the original source. After that, it is just a case of ticking a box to confirm that the original site is following Google’s webmaster guidelines and then clicking the “Submit” button.
Google is not promising their new tool will provide a quick solution to the problem—or any solution at all—they are merely asking that webmasters let them know about the problem. Bearing in mind Google’s low opinion of duplicate content and even lower level of tolerance to search engine spam, it seems likely that Google will take some kind of definitive action against sites that offend in this way.
Webmasters who wish to remove infringing content from the internet, or from the search results, do have other options available to them, but taking action against scraped content can be time-consuming, so the new Google Scraper Report is certainly a step in the right direction. Want to check it out? Here’s a link
