Google's head of search spam, Matt Cutts, responded to a Hacker News thread where Dan Goldin was upset with spammer SEOs when he noticed a site was scraping the content and images off of his mother's site.
In short, Matt Cutts responded that the scraper site is not benefiting from the stolen content. Matt said the site is not getting any traffic from Google, from what he can tell.
Matt wrote:
Hey Dan, it's annoying when a someone scrapes your website, and it's even more annoying that this site tried to claim your Mom's images with Getty. But as far as I can tell, the site that you mentioned isn't having any success at all. For all the work that this spammer put into copying your Mom's site, it doesn't look like they're getting even a single digit number of visitors from Google. So they may be annoying, but their attempts at spamming didn't do them any good at all.Feel free to do a DMCA request, but I'm already passing this to my team as a spam report and we'll dig into it. I don't know how Getty deals with scrapers though, so you'll need to look into that on your side.
I made a video with advice about dealing with scraping a few years ago that might be useful for you: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5CosWAVLCZg
It is interesting to see Matt say, "it doesn't look like they're getting even a single digit number of visitors from Google." Why not? How does he know the site's analytics? The site is indexed by Google, but Matt knows the site isn't getting any traffic from Google. I guess he has ways of knowing by looking at the click through data that one would find in Webmaster Tools?
Either way, here is Matt's video on scrapers:
Some other fun reading related to this:
- Scraper Site Software Site Complains Site Not Listed In Google, Seriously!
- Google's Scraper Algorithm Now Live
Forum discussion at Hacker News.
