Content scraping or theft is when original content is stolen from a blog to republish on another blog or site.  This is considered to be plagiarism or copyright infringement, but since the Web is not completely regulated yet, scraping has become an extremely common problem.  Although, this process can be done manually, normally it is done by automated software programs that allow content to be easily scraped from any blog.

Blog Post Theft

Some people practice scraping to intentionally harm others, but some do not know they are actually creating harm.  If the original content is published on other blogs or websites, it can cause duplicate content issues, especially if the copied content out-ranks the original content in the search engines (See my blog post on duplicate content).

I have experienced this problem myself in the last few months, and I have let it slide because I know people who copied my posts meant no harm.  Although I appreciate and encourage sharing of content, there are netiquette rules that should be followed (I will cover this topic in a different post). (more…)