How to Deal with Content Scrapers?

Many scrapers copy and replicate content without having bad intentions. Sometimes contacting the scraper can end the problem. Many scrapers feel afraid when they know someone knew about them and so they might delete the content they scraped.

A whois query is a type of query that can be done online using a browser using any free Whois service provider such as https://www.whois.net. The Whois query can help you know some very valuable information about the scraper such as his hosting service and domain registrar.

DMCA, which stands for Digital Millennium Copyright Act, is a widely known standard that allows copyright owners to submit DMCA requests to different entities to take a website, a web page or even a post offline if it violates the copyrights of the original owner.

Many scrapers copy content in order to make money and sell products. By finding out the payment gateway the scraper sells through (for example: Paypal), the payment gateway can be contacted and the scraper can be prevented from selling anything.

Send a DMCA request to the company that provided the domain name for the scraper site. This might help stopping the scraper or even result in seizing the domain name.

Many scrapers try to make money using third party ad providers such as Google Adsense. By sending a DMCA request to the ad provider of the scraper, you will prevent him from running ads on his website since his ad account will get disabled. (See Why Internet Cookies are harmless?)

Google has created a scraping reporting tool which, according to Google, should be used to report any scraper website that ranks about the original website. This can result in applying a penalty to the scraper’s site or even de-indexing it from Google.

Google Webmaster tools has a tool that can help a web admin submit a DMCA request to Google in case someone violates copyrights. Use the tool to report all scraped and copied pages. This might get the site de-indexed from Google.

If the person sells your copyrighted book on Amazon, puts your articles on a blog or copies your images to Pinterest then contacting any of those respective third parties will result in the removal of content.

If you managed to find out the IP address of the scraper, use the .htaccess file to block his access to your site and content.

If that site gets a lot of traffic from other search engines, you should contact them with your formal DMCA request. (See Why do websites have so many ads?)

Some websites can provide you with the DMCA service by doing all the needed work that you have to do in exchange for a fee. If you don’t have much time, you can use one of those services. Example: http://www.dmca.com/