Even after all this time, the Web is still full of surprises. After having published the last post, “A ♥ for Language Blogs,” I thought I’d check how many language blogs out there had done the same thing. One of the results was a blog called Translation details. Their post (http://goo.gl/HNi28), it turns out, was a simple scrape and post job of the original article by the Jenner twins. Such “dumb” scraping is not uncommon, but a nuisance. Scrapers usually copy anybody’s content to create the proper environment for their ads. Of course, no attribution was given.
It would have been business as usual had there not been this wrinkle: It turned out not to be a “simple” scrape after all. Where the original identified my blog as Translate This!, the scrapers had written Interpret That!; instead of Brave New Words they wrote Fearless New Words; instead of Thoughts on Translation it was Ideas on Translation. They also seem to have a law against the word “friend.” It was replaced by “companion.” Any ideas what is going on?
Interesting. Another instance of cheapo reproduction of someone else’s content. I’m pretty sure that the scraping program here automatically generates random synonyms for every fourth or fifth or sixth noun or adjective in the stolen content and then publishes it. Why? Because if it simply copied the scraped text, Google’s recent algorithm change would identify it as a cheapo duplicate and demote it in search rankings. Fascinating, since the algorithm change only occurred a couple of months ago. The people who do this are like drug-resistant bacteria.
Miguel,
The Google angle would make sense. But man, that’s a lot of extra work where once copy and paste was enough. I like the “drug-resistant bacteria” picture!
Eventually these copiers will fail. Keep writing your unique original content and Google will reward you with good rankings. To gain ranking it takes more than just content and if they are cheating on this then they are probably not doing the work that is required to get on page one.