Using Scrapers to your advantage.
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If you are a regular reader of this blog, then I’m sure you saw the keyword spam I wrote yesterday. I mainly did it for a test. This blog has always been a target of splog scraping blogs. I get content syndicated all the time and for the most part I ignore it. I know a lot of people complain about the practice of this all the time and while yes it is annoying and the spammers get a little of your content for free. At least that has been my experience, if they took the entire article then I would get perturbed, but for a sentence or two I’m not going to spend my time chasing them down, especially when they leave me a link.
Well lately the spammers have left me along and have not been grabbing my content at all. Then the other day when I posted my ten steps to better Adsense earnnings they jumped all over me. And when I say jumped my Askimet filter filled up. One tihng I noticed is some of the sites that linked to that post where not of the make money type splog. I had Weight Loss splogs, Golf Tip splogs and a host of others. Well it occurred to me, since they are going to do this anyway how can make them work for me. So I set down and started thinking of all the keywords I could think of and I wrote my keyword filled post. Well what do you think happened. They jumped all over me again.
From the two posts, I gained 32 backlinks to my blog, now these are not great links and I would be surprised if I every got a visitor because of them, but they did kick my technorati authority up three points and lowered my rank 6K spots. Now this is not something I would do a lot, but its interesting that a technique such as this could be used to trick the spammers into working a little for you. Afterall they are going to steal your content anyway, you might as well get a little something back.
***Update**** I need to do a little update to my figures above. Since they liked this post too, I’ve gained 9 more backlinks and Technorati jumped another 7 Authority points with another 8K jump in blog spot. If I could get a couple of you readers to write a post and link to this one, then I could break 100 in Authority now. Hint Hint 
Technorati tags: splogs, scrapers, technorati, adsense, weight loss, golf tips, seo, backlinks
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Comments
Yeah, I don’t have problems with splogs either if they link back to me. I do have Aaron Wall’s SEO book and I don’t think it says anything about Google penalizing you for being scraped as long as it’s an excerpt and not dup content.
For some strange reason, I get hit with pharmaceutical companies a lot and I have no idea why… I don’t blog about that stuff.
I have to laugh at this. Sorry. It does make me angry but I can see the “silver lining” as Nate called it. Okay, okay, I’ll relax about it a little. Thanks for sharing. I just went to look at the article you did… it’s hilarious! You nut!
This is a good article for dealing with the scraper and splog sites. Another little tip that I figured out for using these sites to increase Technorati rank is to do manual pinging. You can go to the ping form page at Technorati, enter the URL of any web page that you know contains a link to your site, and press the “Ping” button to send out Technorati’s crawlers.
Sometimes it will take up to 24 hours to get credited with the authority point, but I have found that this is a good way to quickly increase authority when you have backlinks from lots of obscure sites that do not normally get crawled often.
About two weeks ago, I used this tactic by simply browsing through my backlinks at Yahoo’s site explorer page, opening up the Technorati ping form in another tab, and pinging any sites that I knew were not crediting me with backlinks at Technorati. It took a few minutes to get through them all, but at the end of the day I was able to increase my Technorati authority by more than 20 points with relatively little effort.
Good article