Scrapers Can Eat a Butt

So I was Googling myself (shameful, I know) and a lot of the main keywords that I thought my website would rank highly actually had scrapers that had stolen my content as the top result.

a drawing of a paint scraper
This is the wrong kind of scraper.

Don’t know what a “scraper” is? Well, it’s basically an automated website that copies wholesale the content from other webpages. In my case, they probably copy my stuff directly from my RSS feed as soon as it updates.

What disturbs me is how often these types of sites are showing up as the top result in search results. Either Google‘s algorithm has gone janky, or lots of people are linking to these websites. If people are linking to them a lot, I blame those damn tumblr and Pinterest bookmarklets, because they’ve made it so that people don’t even think before they link to a bad source. People just share content that they like and they don’t ever think about the people who created it.

Of course, I know I’ve shared things without checking before, so I probably shouldn’t complain too much.

So, if you ever wonder why I sign and watermark everything, it’s because thievery has become automated and it’s impossible to reason with a Chinese robot.