Scraping: The Bottom of the Barrel

Many of you who stop by regularly, here at A Family Tapestry, are also bloggers in your own right. You likely work hard to produce posts that will accurately represent your research—or share your latest discoveries in whatever topic you choose to discuss. Though you may not get paid for your efforts, you offer them in the sincere hope that your work will be of benefit to others.

In one way, as bloggers, we share and share alike.

That, however, is vastly different from the instance of those who freely offer on their own site, but unbeknownst to them, have had their work lifted and repackaged on another website—a place likely using that very content to make someone else a profit.

That little sleight of hand is called content scraping (or, in some cases, blog scraping) and it has occasionally become a topic of conversation amongst members of the genea-blogging community—usually in the form of outraged diatribes against such perpetrators by those personally wronged.

If you think you have never had that happen to you, dear blogger, think again. The mere effort of cutting and pasting the title, or an excerpt, from one of your recent blog posts into the search box at Google may reveal otherwise. I know it has done so for me.

Not only that, but there are tools available to such content scrapers to make their “job” even easier. When I googled the term to find relevant sites to support today’s post, the first item to come up was not an example or definition source, but an ad for software to facilitate content scraping. You see, you are not just up against a well-meaning but misguided zealous fellow-researcher, but a worldwide variety of people who see no problem in stealing your hard work.

I’ve been blogging for less than four years, but during that time, I’ve also been an avid genealogy blog reader. And I recall several of my fellow bloggers reporting how they encountered that loss on a personal basis.

The instance that stands out in my mind most vividly is when that occurred to GeneaBloggers originator, Thomas MacEntee. Thomas, blogging not only because of his fascination with genealogy but because, well, computer geeks can do this stuff blindfolded with one arm tied behind their backs, not only took this loss as the serious threat that it was to his business, but put his considerable computing knowledge to work in fighting back.

If you don’t recall Thomas’ frustration, back in 2012, dealing with “sploggers” who were stealing his content, you might find it helpful to check out how he went about combating the problem. He also shared his resource page of links on how to do this, which he posted on Pinterest.

In a different episode, another blogger—Heather Kuhn Roelker of Leaves for Trees—had commented, “I work too hard on writing my blog for it just to be stolen.” Heather found Thomas’ advice helpful. I’m sure a number of others have, too.

Content scrapers do not only target genealogy bloggers, of course. So it is no surprise to find blogs which offer generic advice for all sorts of bloggers in this predicament, such as this one for WordPress bloggers. In fact, it was a recent announcement about a new anti-scraping plug-in for WP bloggers that got me re-thinking this very issue.

In the past, my thoughts had ranged everywhere from “Who would copy my stuff?” to “So what if they copy my stuff; I have enough internal links to lead readers back to my own site.” I pretty much still hold to that latter thought. However, just because content scraping software likely doesn’t know how to differentiate between the rest of the post and a concluding sentence that essentially says, “Hey, if you didn’t find this post on my blog, come read it at my own site,” I’d like to start adding a sentence like that to the bottom of my posts. That way, when the scrapers scrape the rest of my content and lift it to their own site, they’ll also be lifting a sentence that tells readers where to go to get the rest of the story.

Of course, for you who are reading my posts here on my own blog site, it will seem redundant. But humor me. It can take me anywhere from ninety minutes to three or four hours to complete the research and writing for just one of my posts. I’m with Heather: I don’t want to do all that work for someone else’s online profit-making machine, either. However, I don’t want to add another several hours to that tally, just to fight my way through all the hoops necessary to get those people to cease and desist.

I just want to spend my time doing what I feel would be my best contribution: doing the research and writing for my own posts. For you—my regular readers who stop by here at A Family Tapestry to spend a moment every day, and perhaps share a few words of comment as well. It's for a readership community and to further our mutual research interests that I do this. I'd like to keep it that way.