Content Scrapers – How to Find Out Who is Stealing Your Content & What to Do About It

If you have been blogging for a while, chances are you are familiar with content scrapers. Content scrapers are websites that steal your content for their own blogs without your permission. Some content scrapers will just copy the content off of your blog, but most use automated software that takes the content from your RSS feed and posts your content to their site like it is a new post.

In this post, we are going to look at some potential link building benefits to content scrapers, how to find out what sites are scraping your content, and what you can do if you want to either benefit from the linking standpoint or have them take it down.

Linking Benefits of Content Scrapers

Last week, I was happy to see that I was listed in ProBlogger’s 20 Bloggers to Watch in 2012. Within 24 hours, I received a notification in my WordPress dashboard that a page on my blog had been linked to in the post on ProBlogger’s site.

After receiving the original notification from the ProBlogger post, I also received another 18 trackbacks from sites that had stolen the content in their post verbatim. Trackbacks are WordPress’ way of letting you know that another website has linked to a post on your blog. In this case, these 18 sites had posted the content exactly like the original post – with the links back to my blog still intact.

It was then that I started contemplating the potential link building benefits of content scrapers. These are not by any means quality links – the highest Google PageRank was a PR 2 domain, many were stealing content in a variety of languages, and one even had the nerve to use some kind of redirection script to take away the link juice of outgoing links! So while these links didn’t have the same authority that the original post had, they still count as links.

How to Catch Content Scrapers

Unfortunately, unless you want to continuously search for your post titles in Google, you’ll only be able to easily track down sites that keep your in-content links active. If you want to know what websites are scraping your content, here are a few tips to sniff them out.

Copyscape

Copyscape is a simple search engine that allows you to enter the URL of your content to find out if there are duplicates of it on the Internet. You can get a few results using their free search, or you can pay for a premium account to check up to 10,000 pages on your site and more.

Trackbacks

The first way is through your trackbacks in WordPress (as shown in the image above). Many of these will show up in the spam folder if you use Akismet. The key to getting trackbacks to appear from content scrapers is to always include links to other posts in your content. Be sure those links have great anchor text too, if you’re going for a little extra link juice. And even if you are not, internal linking with strong anchor text is good for your on-site optimization too!

Anyone thinking about link building benefits at this point is probably noting the sheer volume of links from these sites, some of which are content scrapers. Essentially any site that is linking to a lot of your posts that isn’t a social network, social bookmarking site, or a die-hard fan who just loves linking to you is potentially a content scraper. You’ll have to go to their website to be sure. To find your links on their site, click on one of the domains to see the details of what pages on your site they are linking to specifically.

You can see here that they are just blatantly copying my posts titles. When I visited one of the links, sure enough, they are copying my entire posts in their full glory onto their site.

Google Alerts

If you don’t post often or want to keep up with any mentions of your top blog posts on other websites, you can create a Google Alert using the exact match for your post’s title by putting the title in quotation marks.

I deliver all of my Google Alerts to an RSS feed so I can manage them in Google Reader, but you can also have them delivered regularly by email. You’ll even get an instant preview of the types of results you will get.

How to Get Credit for Scraped Posts

If you use WordPress, then you definitely want to try out the RSS footer plugin. This plugin allows you to place a custom piece of text at the top or bottom of your RSS feed content.
As you can see, even if you aren’t using it for the purpose of getting credit back to your posts when content thieves steal it, you can still use it for a little extra bit of advertising with the possible benefit of people who subscribe to your RSS feed clicking through to your website or social profiles. And when someone does scrape your content from your RSS feed, it shows up there too

So in the event that someone finds your scraped content, they will hopefully notice the credit before assuming it was created by the blog that stole it. If you don’t have WordPress, you can simply include a note at the top or bottom of your content that includes the same information.

How to Stop Content Scrapers

If you’re not interested in anyone copying your content, then you have a few options to choose from. You can start by contacting the site that is stealing your content and sending them a notice that you want all of your content removed immediately. You can do this through the site’s contact form, email address, or post it to any social accounts they list.

If there is no contact information on the website stealing your content, you can do a Whois Lookup to (hopefully) find out who owns the domain.

If it is not privately registered, you should find an administrative contact’s email address. If not, you should at least see the domain registrar which, in this case, is GoDaddy and/or the hosting company for the website which, in this case, is HostGator. You can try to contact both companies (HostGator has a DMCA form and GoDaddy has an email) and let them know that the domain in question is stealing copyrighted content in hopes that the website will be suspended or removed.

You can also visit the DMCA and use their takedown services to remove anyone who is copying your photos, video, audio, blog, or other content. They even offer a WordPress plugin to incorporate a DMCA protected badge on your site to warn potential thieves.

Have you ever dealt with content scrapers and thieves? Do you leave it alone for the link benefits, or do you fight back? What other tools, services, or other preventative tactics do you use to block content scrapers? Please share your thoughts and experiences in the comments!

Source URL : https://blog.kissmetrics.com/content-scrapers/

Web Data Scraping: Practical Uses

Whether in the form of media, text or data in diverse other formats—the internet serves to be a huge storehouse of the world’s information. While browsing for commercial or business needs alike, users are exposed to numerous web pages that contain data in just about every form. Even though access to such data is extremely critical for garnering success in the contemporary world, unfortunately most of it is not open. More often than not, business websites restrict the accessibility options to such data and do not allow visitors to save or display them for reuse on their local storage devices, or onto their own websites.  This is where web data extraction tools come in handy.

Read on for a closer look into some of the common areas of data scraping usage.

• Gathering of data from diverse sources for analysis: In case a business necessitates the collection and analysis of data specific to certain categories from multiple websites, then it helps refer to web data integration experts or those related to the field of data scraping linked with categories like industrial equipment, real estate, automobiles, marketing, business contacts, electronic gadgets and so forth.

• Collection of data in different formats: Different websites are known to publish information and structured data in different formats. So, it may not be possible for organizations to see all the required data a one place, at any given time. Data scrapers allow the extraction of information spanning across multiple pages under various sections, on to a single database or spreadsheet.  This makes it easy for users to analyze (or visualize) the data.

• Helps Research: Data is an important and integral part of all kinds of research – marketing, academic or scientific. A data scraper helps in gathering structured data with ease.

• Market analysis for businesses: Companies that cater to products or services connected to specific domains require comprehensive data of products and services that are of similar kind, and which have a tendency of appearing in the market on a daily basis.

Web scraping software solutions from reputed companies are successful in keeping a constant watch on this kind of data and allow users to get access required information from diverse sources – all at the click of a button.
Go for data extraction to take your business to the next levels of success – you will not be disappointed.

Source URL : http://www.3idatascraping.com/web-data-scraping-practical-uses.php

Data Scraping - What Are Hand-Scraped Hardwood Floors and What Are the Benefits?

If you love the look of hardwood flooring with lots of character, then you may want to check out hand-scraped hardwood flooring. Hand-scraped wood provides a warm vintage look, providing the floor instant character. These types of scraped hardwoods are suitable for living rooms, dining rooms, hallways and bedrooms. But what exactly is hand-scraped hardwood flooring?

Well, it is literally what you think it is. Hand-scraped hardwood flooring is created by hand using specialized wood working tools to make each board unique and giving an overall "old worn" appearance.

At Innovation Builders we offer solid wood floors finished on site with an actual hand-scraping technique followed by stain and sealer. Solid wood floors are installed by an expert team of technicians who work each board with skilled craftsman-like attention to detail. Following the scraping procedure the floor is stained by hand with a customer selected stain color, and then protected with multiple coats of sealing and finishing polyurethane. This finishing process of staining, sealing and coating the wood floors contributes to providing the look and durability of an old reclaimed wood floor, but with today's tough, urethane finishes.

There are many, many benefits to hand-scraped wood flooring. Overall, these floors are extremely durable and hard wearing, providing years of trouble-free use. These wood floors remain looking newer for longer because the texture that the process provides hides the typical dents, dings and scratches that other floors can't hide so easily. That's great news for households with kids, dogs, and cats.

These types of wood flooring have another unique advantage as well. When you do scratch these floors during their lifetime, the scratches are easily repaired. As long as the scratch isn't too deep you can make them practically disappear without ever having to hire a professional. It's simple to hide the scratch by using a color-matched stain marker or repair kit that is readily available through local flooring distributors. These features make hand-scraped hardwood flooring a lot more durable and hassle-free to maintain than other types of wood flooring.

The expert processes utilized in the creation of these floors provides a custom look of worn wood with deep color and subtle highlights. When the light hits the wood at different times during the day, it provides an understated but powerful effect of depth and beauty. They instantly offer your rooms a rustic look full of character, allowing your home to become a warm and inviting environment. The rustic look of this wood provides a texture, style and rustic appeal that cannot be matched by any other type of flooring.

Hand-Scraped Hardwood Flooring is a floor that says welcome and adds a touch of elegance to any home. If you are looking to buy a new home and you haven't had the opportunity to see or feel hand scraped hardwoods, stop in any of the model homes at Innovation Builders in Keller, North Richland Hills or Grand Prairie, Texas and check it out!

Source URL :   http://yellowpagesdatascraping.blogspot.in/2015/06/data-scraping-what-are-hand-scraped.html

Increasing Accessibility by Scraping Information From PDF

You may have heard about data scraping which is a method that is being used by computer programs in extracting data from an output that comes from another program. To put it simply, this is a process which involves the automatic sorting of information that can be found on different resources including the internet which is inside an html file, PDF or any other documents. In addition to that, there is the collection of pertinent information. These pieces of information will be contained into the databases or spreadsheets so that the users can retrieve them later.

Most of the websites today have text that can be accessed and written easily in the source code. However, there are now other businesses nowadays that choose to make use of Adobe PDF files or Portable Document Format. This is a type of file that can be viewed by simply using the free software known as the Adobe Acrobat. Almost any operating system supports the said software. There are many advantages when you choose to utilize PDF files. Among them is that the document that you have looks exactly the same even if you put it in another computer so that you can view it. Therefore, this makes it ideal for business documents or even specification sheets. Of course there are disadvantages as well. One of which is that the text that is contained in the file is converted into an image. In this case, it is often that you may have problems with this when it comes to the copying and pasting.

This is why there are some that start scraping information from PDF. This is often called PDF scraping in which this is the process that is just like data scraping only that you will be getting information that is contained in your PDF files. In order for you to begin scraping information from PDF, you must choose and exploit a tool that is specifically designed for this process. However, you will find that it is not easy to locate the right tool that will enable you to perform PDF scraping effectively. This is because most of the tools today have problems in obtaining exactly the same data that you want without personalizing them.

Nevertheless, if you search well enough, you will be able to encounter the program that you are looking for. There is no need for you to have programming language knowledge in order for you to use them. You can easily specify your own preferences and the software will do the rest of the work for you. There are also companies out there that you can contact and they will perform the task since they have the right tools that they can use. If you choose to do things manually, you will find that this is indeed tedious and complicated whereas if you compare this to having professionals do the job for you, they will be able to finish it in no time at all. Scraping information from PDF is a process where you collect the information that can be found on the internet and this does not infringe copyright laws.

 Source  URL : http://ezinearticles.com/?Increasing-Accessibility-by-Scraping-Information-From-PDF&id=4593863

Web Scraping to Create Open Data

Open data is the idea that some data should be freely available to everyone to use and republish as they wish, without restrictions from
copyright, patents or other mechanisms of control.

My first experience with open data was in the year 2010. I wanted to create a better app for Bicing, the local bike sharing system in
Barcelona. Their website was a nightmare to use and I was tired of needing to walk to each station, trying to guess which ones had bicycles.
There was no app for Android, other than a couple of unofficial attempts that didn’t work at all.

I began as most would; I searched the internet and found a library named python-bicing that was somehow able to retrieve station and
bike information. This was my first time using Python and, after some investigation, I learned what the code was doing: accessing the
official website, parsing the JavaScript that generated their buggy map and giving back a nice chunk of Python objects that represented
bike share stations.

This I learned was called web scraping. It was like I had figured out a magic trick that would allow me to always be able to access the data I
needed without having to rely on faulty websites.

The rise of OpenBicing and CityBikes

Shortly after, I launched OpenBicing, an Android app for the local bike sharing system in Barcelona, together with a backend that used
python-bicing. I also shared a public API that provided this information so that nobody else had to do the dirty work ever again.

Since other cities were having the same problem, we expanded the scope of the project worldwide and renamed it CityBikes. That was 6
years ago.

To date, CityBikes is the most comprehensive and widely used open API for bike sharing information, with support for over 400 cities
worldwide. Our API processes around 10 requests per second and we scrape each of the 418 feeds about every three minutes. Making our
core library available for anyone to contribute has been crucial in maintaining and adding coverage for all of the supported systems.

The open data fallacy

We are usually regarded as “an open data project” even though less than 10% of our feeds come from properly licensed, documented and
machine-readable feeds. The remaining 90% is composed of 188 feeds that are machine-readable, but not licensed nor documented and
230 that are entirely maintained by scraping HTML pages.

North American BikeShare Association) recently published GBFS (General Bikeshare Feed Specification). This is clearly a step in the right
direction, but I can’t help but look at the almost 60% of services we currently support through scraping and wonder how long it will take the
remaining organizations to release their information, if ever. This is even more the case considering these numbers aren’t even taking into
account worldwide coverage.

Over the last few years there has been a progression by transportation companies and city councils toward providing their information as
“open data”. Directive 2003/98/EC encourages EU member states to release information regarding public services.

Yet, in most cases, there’s little action in enforcing Public Private Partnerships (PPP) to release their public information under a non-
restrictive license or even to transfer ownership of the data to city councils to be included in their open data portals.

Even with the increasing number of companies and institutions interested in participating in open data, by no means should we consider
open data a reality or something to be taken for granted. I firmly believe in the future and benefits of open data, I have seen them
happening all around CityBikes, but as technologists we need to stress the fact that the data is not out there yet.

The benefits of open data

When I started this project, I sought to make a difference in Barcelona. Now you can find tons of bike sharing apps that use our API on all
major platforms. It doesn’t matter that these are not our own apps. They are solving the same problem we were trying to fix, so their
success is our success.

Besides popular apps like Moovit or CityMapper, there are many neat projects out there, some of which are published under free software
licenses. Ideally, a city council could create a customization of any of these apps for their own use.

Most official applications for bike sharing systems have terrible ratings. The core business of transportation companies is running a service,

so they have no real motivation to create an engaging UI or innovate further. In some cases, the city council does not even own the rights to
the data, being completely at the mercy of the company providing the transportation service.

Open data over apps

When providing public services, city councils and companies often get lost in what they should offer as an aid to the service. They focus on
a nice map or a flashy application, rather than providing the data behind these service aids. Maps, apps, and websites have a limited focus
and usually serve a single purpose. On the other hand, data is malleable and the purest form of representation. While you can’t create
something new from looking and playing with a static map (except, of course, if you scrape it), data can be used to create countless
different iterations. It can even provide a bridge that will allow anyone to participate, improve and build on top of these public services.

Wrap Up

At this point, you might wonder why I care so much about bike sharing. To me it’s not about bike sharing anymore. CityBikes is just too
good of an open data metaphor, a simulation in which public information is freely accessible to everyone. It shows the benefits of open
data and the deficiencies that arise from the lack thereof.

We shouldn’t have to create open data by scraping websites. This information should be already available, easily accessed and provided in
a machine-readable format from the original providers, be they city councils or transportation companies. However, until there’s another
option, we’ll always have scraping.


Source : https://blog.scrapinghub.com/2016/03/30/web-scraping-to-create-open-data/

Web Scraping – Ethical Data Collection Activity or an Illegal Practice?

Abiding by the definition, web scrapping is a method to extract data from website. There can be different reasons to perform this task, such as for reporting, market research, to determine share indexes, know website updates, product rate updates, to monitor data, and so on. Besides these, data theft is another of the prominent motives behind web data extraction, which ultimately holds the use of a web scraper as unethical and at times, illegal.

Technical definition

In technical terms, data scraping is a method of collecting data from a website through specific software. These software programs or web scrapers give the website owners the impression of human web surfing and extract a big volume of data, which is usually difficult for any user visitor to access manually. The apps simulate human exploration of online data by embedding web browsers, or implementing HTTP to fulfill the cause of data extractors.

Relation with data mining

Usually, data mining refers to analyzing data from varied perspectives and transforming it to meaningful information that could help in boosting sales or mitigating financial risks in a business. As for web scraping, it involves extraction of analytical data from the web. At present, web scrapping comprises major source of data extraction carried out by data miners. This is because almost everything is now available online and for any data miner, this resource is no less than a gold mine.

The web scraping process

In this data scraping method, the experts look out for tricks to format the URLs into pages that include the usable information. The web scrapers then parse the DOM tree to extract data from the website. In simple language, the web scrapers process the semi-structured or unstructured data pages of the desired website and then convert the resulting data into a well structured form. The users can harvest or modify the structured data in a better manner.

Web scraping – legal or unethical?

It solely relies on your intentions, whether you are doing this activity in the interest of the masses or just wish to satisfy your personal interests. If it is for a goodwill, such as to research on share index to predict the market situation in the coming days, it is fine. Another positive example could be to identify the trend of market and suggest a client on viable business boosting methods accordingly.

However, if you are doing web scraping for personal gratification then it may well be termed as intrusion into one’s personal data. For example, if you are hacking into the database of a university to steal the academic articles and using them in your own project. Any such instance is definitely an act of stealth and may accompany relevant punishment. Concisely, to get hold of someone’s creative work for individual gains is unethical. Such people also deploy several bots to for data scraping or spinning, which in turn choke the search engine results and hardly useful to the internet.

Considerations that deem web scraping illegal

Generally, web scraping is illegal in two instances:

1. When you violate the terms and conditions of the service of the concerned website:

Most of the data-oriented websites disallow data scraping. Hence, if you are trying to extract data from that website, the owner has all the rights to sue you on the offense of breach of contract.

2. When you publish scraped content:

This is yet another condition that may delve you into violating the right of the copyright holders. If you are only scraping the content for fair use, it may be permissible. However, companies often hold all the publishing rights and may file suit against you if you publish their data without their permission.

Remedy to illegal web scraping

Despite running the apprehensions of getting identified, unethical web scrapers deter to steal data from websites. Hence, the web owners themselves need to be alert enough not to fall prey to such fraudulent activities. Indeed, it is your data and you won’t like it to get compromised at any cost. Just like there are many web scraping tools available online, you can also opt for applications that offer protection against web data extraction as a fruitful remedy. These software safeguard your website content from hacking attacks such as bots, denial of service, brute force, session opening and transaction anomalies, and more.

Summary: Technology has two facets – good and bad. It depends on us which one to adopt; the same holds in the case of web scraping as well. We should make sure to use this innovation for the benefit of society and not to steal away some one’s creativity, which is indeed unethical and at times, illegal

Source : http://www.web-parsing.com/blog/ethical-data-collection-activity-or-an-illegal-practice

Taking a cue from the Ryanair screen scraping judgment

Screen scraping is the best way to aggregate web data much faster than a human possibly can. However, is there any such thing known as ethical web scraping?

Well it’s not scraping in itself that is good or bad. What matters is how you use the scraped data. It would be extremely unethical to steal data, republish it or use it to cause harm to a business. This was clearly established when the EU passed a judgment in favour of Ryanair.

The EU’s highest court passed a judgment in favour of Ryan air, and this will positively prevent people from scraping and using others data in an unethical manner. Ryanair had claimed that PR Aviation scraped its data regarding the flight scheduled and then used it to allow people book Ryanair flights via the PR Aviation website and this is clearly an infringement of database rights.

Source:http://www.habiledata.com/blog/taking-cue-ryanair-screen-scraping-judgment/