Make Money Without Doing Evil - A Lesson in Content Scraping - The Day I Tried to Scrape
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What I got back let me a little disheartened, where I thought the document would read well and have a great flow, turned out to go from one paragraph talking about a topic related to my keyword term, to the next paragraph, which jumped to discussing another different topic related to my keyword term. This went on through each of the paragraphs.
Okay I said let me try again and ran the software through again entering a completely unrelated keyword term, and let it fly. Again I was presented with garbaged paragraphs of text. To say I was disappointed is an understatement. I mean, who couldn't use a good program to writer original content?
Then I realized something besides the fact that I was ripped off. If there was such a program that could write original content, websites like SEOChat (which pay me to write) would not need me to write any longer.
I will say that since I was not happy, I applied to end the subscription and was removed promptly and no additional charges were ever attempted to my credit card. I have not been pestered by the company to try the software again or any other solicitations.
Now one thing about me that probably makes me less of a blogger than others in my profession is I will not give any software review on my blog of junk software. The reason I do not do this is because I do not feel that they deserve any advertising from me. My readers should not be sent to a junk site from my site, and I see no reason to build a link to the site. Plus you may have to put up with lawyers, and the less one needs to deal with them the better.
Soon the masses started finding out about the supposed ability of these scraper programs to provide original content for their websites and bought into the subscription services and stand alone software programs that are offering this type of content. They started flooding their sites with what they thought was original content.
Once some of these sites started to bump other websites out of their rankings, people began to investigate and more than likely started filing spam complaints with Google, thereby setting in motion another chance for the Google engineers to have their fun.
You see for each new find that a webmaster makes that allows them to cheat the search engines there is an even more determined Google engineer who wants to stop the brilliant webmaster and all the brilliant webmasters friends by writing a bit of code into the algorithim. A hand ban which could be done easily, doesn't allow Google to test their expertise nearly as much as using the algorithim. By writing code in the algorthim to eliminate such problems the engineers are able to also learn what will work in certain situations.
Next: Google's Algorithm Solution >>
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