Is content scraping useful for SEO or harmful?

Question

Is content scraping useful for SEO or harmful? Scraping: Taking content from other places on the web and publishing it on your own site. There are many websites that only contain pieces of other websites or stolen content. Many sites will take articles from other websites and publish them as if they were their own, or will copy entire websites.Will this process is useful for SEO rankings.

Answer 1

Content Scraping is not at all Good and it is a worst SEO technique (Negative SEO) which will surely harm your website in Panda update. Google will penalize those websites which are following content scraping technique.

In Google support page you can find

Scraped content

Some webmasters use content taken (“scraped”) from other, more reputable sites on the assumption that increasing the volume of pages on their site is a good long-term strategy regardless of the relevance or uniqueness of that content. Purely scraped content, even from high-quality sources, may not provide any added value to your users without additional useful services or content provided by your site; it may also constitute copyright infringement in some cases. It's worthwhile to take the time to create original content that sets your site apart. This will keep your visitors coming back and will provide more useful results for users searching on Google.

Some examples of scraping include:

• Sites that copy and republish content from other sites without adding any original content or value

• Sites that copy content from other sites, modify it slightly (for example, by substituting synonyms or using automated techniques), and republish it

• Sites that reproduce content feeds from other sites without providing some type of unique organization or benefit to the user

• Sites dedicated to embedding content such as video, images, or other media from other sites without substantial added value to the user

Matt Cutts, Google’s head of search spam announced a new tool to let Google know when you find scraped content ranking better than original content and he stated that

If you see a scraper URL outranking the original source of content in Google, please tell us about it: http://t.co/WohXQmI45X

Answer 2

It's worth mentioning that Panda, a Google algorithm update, deals with this specifically. Sites with large swathes of duplicate content or pages with very little content are penalized quite heavily - the idea is to prevent people who's sole purpose is the ranking of keywords. Each page either has to have a good portion of good, unique content or you need ensure that it is kept out of Google's index, by using meta robots tag (noindex, follow) or by preventing crawling using robots.txt

Answer 3

Content scraping is always worst techniques in SEO. If you working on content scraping, please come out from this method. surely this kind of content scrapped websites will get penalty from Google.

Answer 4

Collecting the content from multiple sources it is good to learn new things but it is a NEGATIVE for SEO

Because Google have one algorithm that algorithm is called as a Panda algorithm so if you copied content from other website Google may identify your website and hit with the panda update

if it happen to your website rank is going down day by day...

so my solutions is don't go for content scraping...