Content scraping is when automated scraper bots gather content such as text, pictures, or video from a website without permission. The scraped content is then republished without the authorization of the copyright holder. It might be some time before copyright holders even realize they’ve been the victim of content scraping. It’s also difficult for general web users to know if a site is populated with duplicate content.

Some forms of data extraction have legitimate uses. Companies often use content scraping to compare pricing information or conduct market research. Unfortunately, it’s also common for unethical content scrapers to steal original content and pass it off as their own.

Your content is at risk if you run an e-commerce site or any other web page. All webmasters should understand content scraping and implement robust countermeasures against it. Keep reading to learn how to safeguard your web content from unauthorized scraping bots.

Key Takeaways

• Content scraping is the act of taking content from a web page without permission.
• Content scraping is done using automated web crawlers and scraper bots.
• There are legitimate ways to use scraped content, such as for market research purposes or price comparisons.
• Republishing duplicate content without authorization can constitute copyright infringement.
• Duplicate content can negatively impact SEO rankings and damage a site’s reputation.
• Almost any website can be targeted by web scrapers and bots.

How Content Scraping Works

Content scraping is a type of automated data extraction specifically designed to remove content from a website. Although it can be considered to be a form of web scraping or data scraping, content scraping is a designation on its own. Content scrapers target and copy original website content in particular, not just structured or unstructured data.

Content scraping is done to collect content such as:

• Blog posts
• Opinion pieces
• News articles
• Product reviews
• Research publications
• Technical articles
• Financial information
• Product catalogs
• Pricing information
• Social media posts
• Job listings, property listings, or other types of classifieds
• Images, video, and multimedia content

In its most primitive form, content scraping can be done simply by copying and pasting text or images from one data source, such as a web page, into another data source, like a word processing document or a spreadsheet. This process can be incredibly time-consuming, so it’s not used in any large-scale sense.

Typically, content scraping refers to an automated process using programs known as web crawlers and scraper bots. These automated scraper tools can take massive amounts of original content from thousands of web pages. The entirety of a targeted website’s content can be duplicated in seconds.

Content scraping follows the following steps:

• A crawler bot will systematically analyze links, web pages, and the HTML structure of thousands of websites.
• The web crawler identifies an accessible site with the content it is looking for.
• A scraper bot is then deployed to extract the desired content by copying text, capturing multimedia elements, or downloading video or images.

A skilled coder can write their own web crawlers and scraper bots, but this is a laborious process. Most people who want to engage in content scraping or data scraping use digital tools that are purposefully built to locate and collect data from websites.

Once content has been scraped, it can be used for a variety of purposes, some of which are legal and ethical – and some which are not.   To find out more about the legalities of web scraping, read our in-depth blog on web scraping and the law.

What Is Content Scraping Used For?

Content scraping isn’t always used for illegitimate or malicious purposes. Many companies scrape content for use in aggregation, for market research purposes, or comparison purposes.

Practices such as content scraping, data scraping, web scraping, and price scraping are not inherently illegal in the majority of countries. So, you can legally scrape a website for content. Simply gathering information isn’t a crime. It’s what you do with the content that determines whether your behavior is illegal or unethical.

Some websites allow their content to be scraped as republishing content can be a way of link building. Duplicate content can also be used for syndication purposes, such as guest posts or blogs. This is only legal if the copyright owner or website owner is attributed and has given explicit consent for the content to be republished.

Then there are the unethical and illegal ways in which scraped content is used. Fraudsters can use scraped content to populate fake e-commerce sites, known as spoofed websites. These sites look just like the real thing but are used to steal people’s payment information or their money. A customer might receive low-quality counterfeit products after placing an order or they might receive no goods at all.

Another common practice is to use scraped content to conduct click fraud. Fraudsters populate a spoofed website with ads and then deploy bots to artificially inflate the number of clicks the ads receive. Click fraud can be done for monetary gain or to damage a competitor’s website.

Price scraping is a form of content scraping that can be done for comparison purposes or can be conducted for unethical reasons. A company may use pricing data scraped from competitors to adjust their prices and skew the market.

Email scraping is another unethical and often illegal practice. A spammer will scrape a website for customers’ contact information which is used for mass email spamming or phishing campaigns.

Content scraping is most often done as simple plagiarism. Scammers and fraudsters use duplicate content to populate websites. A webmaster can populate thousands of websites using scraped data. While this practice can attract web traffic, it’s important to remember that uniqueness is a highly valuable SEO metric. Sites with a lot of duplicate content that doesn’t offer value to the user can be flagged by a web server as a spoofed site and taken down.

And it’s not just the fraudulent websites that are impacted. Content scraping can have a range of negative effects on the original website as well.

How Can Content Scraping Damage a Website?

Having your content scraped can seriously harm your business, your brand, and your reputation. Both legal and illegal content scraping can have a range of negative impacts on a business. Content scraping can result in reputational damage, a drop in SEO rankings, a decrease in revenue, and increased operational costs.

It takes a considerable amount of time, money, and effort to build up good SEO rankings. Content scraping, whether it’s authorized or not, can undo these efforts. Google’s terms state that if a site has received a large number of valid legal requests to remove scraped data it will be demoted in search rankings ¹. It’s not clear whether a search engine can recognize immediately if the content is from the original site or not, so a legitimate site can be penalised.  The web server may even decide to deactivate a legitimate site believing it is fraudulent.

If your site is being constantly targeted by scraper bots, it can overwhelm the web server and result in the site being taken offline due to a Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attack. Even if your site does stay online, the legitimate user experience may be impacted as bots drain bandwidth, causing slow loading times and lag.

As well as lowering your visibility online, content scraping can cause your customers to lose faith in your business. If your customers are being redirected to fraudulent sites, then your reputation and brand value can take a real hit. Your business may be perceived as untrustworthy or unreliable and customers may move to competitors. This can cause a considerable drop in revenue. And it’s not the only way content scraping can harm your finances. Operational costs can increase as more resources are required to maintain optimal site performance and SEO visibility.

The good news is that there are methods to identify if your content is being scraped and effective countermeasures you can deploy against content scrapers.

How to Identify Content Scraping

One of the easiest ways to determine if your content has been scraped is to conduct a simple search. Just input blog titles or certain phrases into a search engine and see if any duplicates come up in the results. You should also look out for unusual traffic spikes or multiple results from unusual IP addresses. This can indicate a scraping attack.

Wix or WordPress websites have pingback alerts to let you know if someone has scraped your content and linked to it. Google Alerts can be used to monitor your web content. Some keyword tools can also be used to search for duplicated content.

If the presence of scraper bots is detected, then you’ll need to take action to protect your content.

What You Can Do to Protect Your Site from Bots

Taking a few commonsense measures is the first step to protecting your website from content scraping bots. CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) can be configured to make it more difficult for scrapers to locate and extract desired content. JavaScript can also be used to obscure elements and make it more difficult for scraper bots to extract data.

APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) can control access to data and set a limit on the number of requests from any one IP address. WAFs (Web Application Firewalls) can monitor, filter, and block malicious traffic. A content delivery network (CDN) such as Cloudflare can be set to implement systems like CAPTCHA challenges to deter web scraping bots.

By far one of the most effective ways of combating content scraping is to use online fraud and bot protection software like DataDome.

DataDome analyzes scraping and API requests using sophisticated AI and machine learning to detect and block bots in less than 2 milliseconds. With a false positive rate of less than 0.01%, DataDome has been used by sites such as Facebook and Patreon as well as major companies to combat scraper bots and stop fraudsters.

DataDome can effectively protect against web scraping and block bots before they do damage. Book a free demonstration today to see how.