Content Scraping: How Does it Affect Your Business?

What is content scraping?

Content scrapers are automated bots that steal your content from websites and mobile apps for their own use without permission, usually for malicious purposes. Content scrapers typically copy all the content from a webpage and portray it as their own content.

Bots can scrape all of the content on a website in a matter of seconds, even for large websites such as eCommerce sites with thousands of product pages. These bots can scrape public website information such as text, images, HTML and CSS code.

How do they work?

Content scraper bots use sophisticated techniques to illegally send a series of HTTP requests to the website to be copied. Using an API allows these bots to scrape data on a larger scale.

How does content scraping affect your business?

Content scrapers typically target websites with content such as financial information, product and pricing information, product reviews and technical research publications. Serving requests to these bots use up server resources, which can slow down or even crash a website, as well as pushing up infrastructure costs significantly for no commercial benefit.

Scraping is also often used to gather prices and product information from retail websites, or even odds from gambling websites, in order to allow competitors to undercut prices and offers. This has the potential to drive customers and profits away from the target websites.

When content itself is duplicated as a result of scraping, website owners could feel they have wasted time, money and resources in creating original content that is eventually duplicated elsewhere. Scraping can also affect SEO and web authority rankings as copied content can outrank the original owner’s site on Google.

How to stop content scraper bots

Netacea understands that scraping activity appears in many forms. We detect and block content scrapers and other malicious, automated activity on your site by profiling visitor behaviour to distinguish the real from the fictitious. We ensure that only legitimate users access your site and content, and stop any other malicious visitors before they can cause any harm.

Using Intent Analytics™ with machine learning techniques allows our customers to mitigate even the most sophisticated content scraper bots.