A scraper site is a spam website that copies all of its content from other websites using an underlying technology or software that simulate humans’ exploration of the internet.
The purpose of creating such a site can be to collect advertising revenue or to manipulate search engine rankings by linking to other sites to improve their search engine ranking.
In my previous post, I mentioned my ordeal with a scraper site ( hosted on the blogger platform ) that was consistently ripping off or stealing my articles which led me to develop the Simple Feed Customizer.
I investigated the scraper site and later found out how it was stealing my articles which am about to share to you.
I discovered the scraper was using an IFTTT recipe to copies my article from my blog feed and auto publishing it on it blogger blog.
IFTTT (short for “If This Then That”) is a service that enables users to connect different web applications (e.g., Facebook, Evernote, Weather, Dropbox, etc.) together through simple conditional statements known as “Recipes”
You can build your own scraper website on WordPress and blogger platform respectively using RSS Feed to WordPress and RSS to Blogger recipes.
- Login or create an IFTTT account if you do not have one
- Specify the website feed you want to be stealing content from
- Activate the blogger or WordPress site to be use as a scraper simply by authorizing IFTTT
- Hence, whenever the victim website feed get updated, the article will automatically be published to your scraper site.
Conclusion
Scraper sites violate copyright law and search engines like Google frown at them. Copying content from an open content site can be a copyright violation, if done in a way which does not respect the site license.
This article is purely educational, use at your own risk.