What is Scraping?
Scraping refers to the unpermitted extraction of information from a site to be reproduced and published elsewhere, constituting information theft. While some ‘scrape’ data systematically for legitimate purposes, unscrupulous individuals do so to republish articles, listings, or prices to create content that discredits genuine publishers. Sophisticated scraper bots are able to rotate IP addresses and imitate human browsing to evade detection. Publishers monitor their webpages and implement preemptive legal action to stop scrapers from unauthorized harvesting of content. As a black-hat tactic, scraping can harm SEO through duplicate-content scenarios, resulting in redundancy and diluted traffic.
Examples of scraping include an automated program reproducing news stories for a spam website, harvesting item features from an online shop, and collecting user evaluation texts from forums without proper crediting.
Related terms: anti-scraping, crawler, duplicate content, and content theft.