What do you do when you are running a content farm purely for the sake of generating links and trying to game search engine rankings – and you don’t have enough new and original content?

Well, it seems that one strategy is simple – you go around stealing really old content from other people’s sites!

Of course, what you do then, too, as the content spammer is often remove the original dates which then generates no end of confusion for the company whose content was stolen.

Given that we have most of 10 years worth of Voxeo-related content online, I unfortunately see this type of content-scraping happening all too often – and do get inquiries from customers, partners or others who see the “new” news. I’ll get a Google Alert that mentions announcements that happened 4, 5, 6 or more years ago. Or in today’s social world, they’ll show up as tweets in various Twitter searches I run, like this one:

oldnewsrelease.jpg

Now in this particular case, they scraped a Voxeo / Skype / Language Line Services news release from May 2006 about a very cool service that was based on Skype’s initial “Voice Services” developer program that has long since faded into history. Somewhat bizarrely, though, the page they link to is gone and I wind up on a 404 page on some site. Not what I would have expected… but perhaps it is in fact the Twitter account scraping headline content to try to get people to come to its Twitter page and become followers.

I don’t know… and I don’t really have time to care. People ask me why I don’t go after the sites that scrape our content. The reality is that I’ve tried in the past several times and 9 times out of 10 there is bogus contact information and no real way to get in touch with the people behind the site.[1]

Rather than waste my time trying to get content scrapers to pull down our old content, I would rather spend that time generating new content.

Plus, in a somewhat warped way, if they preserve the links to our site and content (and not all do), there is actually a minor benefit in seeing some referrals from those sites to ours.

Is that benefit worth the occasional confusion to our customers and the annoyance of having really old news interrupt our current messaging? It’s probably not. I’d much prefer if the content scrapers / spammers would go away…

I think, though, we’re probably stuck with them. Welcome to our brave new world!

Do you agree? Or have you found a great strategy for dealing with them?

[1] There was one occasion where I did actually reach someone who was scraping our content regularly and surrounding it with their ads. I got the person’s phone number from the DNS registration for their domain and called them up. The person was rather shocked to be called… and we had a very pleasant and educational conversation about copyright and redistribution. They stopped scraping our content. :-)

Originally from Voxeo Blogs