Scrapers and Adsense Scrapers
What is a scraper site?
A scraper site is a web site that pulls content from another web site, almost always in an attempt to increase the value or relevance of the scraper site.
The vast majority of scraper sites do not have any original content of their own, i.e. 100% of what they display may be pulled from other web sites.
Adsense Scrapers
And as if this was not a bad enough moral crime to begin with, enter Adsense Scrapers.
Adsense Scrapers use traditional scraping techniques to fraudulently take a margin out of Google’s Adsense program. The common approach seems to be:
- The scraper site throws a range of popular search phrases (easily found from tools like Wordtracker) at the Google API.
- The Google API returns the highest ranking and most relevant web sites.
- The scraper then scrapes content from the highest ranking site(s) to craft up its own targeted scraper web page.
- The scraper then places low paying bid amounts for the newly crafted scraper page to display in the Adsense/Adwords network.
- Uninformed, trusting users click on the low paying scraper ad (which costs the scraper site a small amount), taking the user to the crafted scraper site.
- The user may then be likely to click on a relevant looking (and higher paying) Adsense ad.
- The scraper then profits the margin between their income from the high paying ad they displayed and the low paying bid that brought them the user.
There is a reasonable chance that the user may still end up with the information they were looking for, but the path the user has taken has been at the expense of two parties:
- The webmaster or company who’s content was scraped, as this was traffic they may have otherwise received.
- The Adsense ad publishers who have paid for a clickthrough from what could not be classed as the most reliable and legitimate of referers. Many of these clicks could be from confused users looking for the most relevant way out of the cluttered or poorly structured scraper page.
Part of managing a strong internet marketing campaign is to do regular detective work and ensure that you aren’t in either of these boats. It could be costing you quite a large sum of money if you invest a reasonable amount in your Adsense campaign. And if you are new to Adsense, it could be robbing you of the decent results that you were hoping for and probably should be achieving.
Tags: Web development