The War Against The Scraper Sites

Martinibuster recently made an interesting post in his blog: Scraper Sites are Good for You - Surrender Your Content. I've pretty much been on the same side - as far as I am concerned, scrapers are just another free link to my site.

The latest Yahoo update and a mini-update at Google both seem to be targeting the oft-maligned "scraper" sites.

We know that Google is definitely targeting the scrapers - Googleguy made a few comments about it in WW, that the Y! update is also targeting scrapers is more speculation on my part, but here's some proof:

What Y! has done, it seems so far, is to increase their offpage requirements for ranking. Scrapers had been having having a field day in the search engines, Yahoo and MSN especially, by having nice snippets of keyword rich text which act as giant keyword nets, ranking for thousands upon thousands of non-competitive terms.

Yahoo had been notorious for ranking sites based on on-page factors alone, but this latest update seems to have changed that.

This means that everyone, scrapers included, is going to have to work a bit better to get authoritative links pointing towards their sites if they want to rank well in Yahoo!