As we have been considering web scraping for positive use, there is also the aspect of the negative use of scraping for the purpose of stealing other bloggers’ proprietary content. Let’s consider some anti web scraping WP plugins.
As for a web content ownership the main indicator here is the indexing done mainly by Google. This means that if the content is scraped and immediately reposted, Google might be fooled to index it as the original, while the genuine source will be counted as content farming. Higher ranking sites might have better chances of being indexed earlier than sites with the original content, and the latter might even get a mark for being spam. This is not necessarily a tendency, but in the past some precedents have happened. This seems ridiculous, but through a published feed the offenders might detect and quickly scrape the original content for repost.
This short essay is about data mining methods applied in web traffic analysis and other business intelligence. It also provides a modern look at data mining in light of the Big Data era.