Although the practice of posting scraped or spun content has been going on for quite a while, Google is determined to end affiliate marketers’ practice of making easy money off someone else’s efforts.
The search engine giant is basically seeking to discourage those who would take content that’s originally available on other sites and add it to their own for marketing revenue or influencing SERP rankings.
What Is Content Scraping?
Content scraping should not be confused with the practice of legitimately quoting other people’s work or rewriting an article while adding your own original take on it, improving its value and adding your own knowledge and ideas to it.
While these practices can be regarded as legitimate, scraping is largely discouraged, since it practically involves copying content and either publishing it as is, or modifying it slightly through the use of automated article spinning software.
Affiliate Marketing Done Right
Google has recently warned scrapers of the dangers of continuing to publish copied content, claiming they will take action to either penalize or completely ban such websites from their index. This needs to be clearly understood, however, as a warning against using those types of content building practices, and not against affiliate marketers.
There are numerous bloggers and site owners that practice the publication of their own high quality blog posts and web articles, earning high rankings on Google’s search result pages who can, and likely will, continue to do so, provided that they continue complying with the search engine’s guidelines regarding the publication of new content.