Backlink-selling scraper sites are harming legitimate publications – here’s how they work.
Remember that interesting article you read just a few days ago on one of your favorite sites? Chances are it’s now been spread around the web – and not in a good way. Spammy sites are constantly stealing content from legitimate websites, passing them off as their own, and making bank in the process. Take a look at these TechRadar Pro articles that were copied and then posted on other sites. While the articles were copied in their entirety, the websites that stole them made sure to change the author names to avoid giving credit to the original author. Unfortunately, there’s not just one or two sites stealing articles, there are many. According to Paul Bischoff, Privacy Advocate at research firm Comparitech, it’s “incredibly easy”. “Even a novice programmer can make a scraper in Python, though some are more sophisticated than others at avoiding detection,” he told us. “Despite this, scrapers are difficult to distinguish from legitimate users. Even big sites haven’t figured out how to combat them.” To see the extent of the problem, copy a sentence from an article on your favorite site and paste it into Google in quotation marks. After doing so you will likely find many articles containing the exact same phrase, which is a good indication that the sites that posted them stole the content. For example, a recent TechRadar Pro article entitled “It’s time CEOs gave SEO the attention it deserves – here’s why” had 77 results when a quote was copied and pasted into Google. This kind of content stealing is both illegal and unethical. So how and why does it happen? Plagiarizing sites steal content from legitimate websites via web scraping, which is the technical term for extracting information from a website. The simplest form is done manually – you’ve probably even done it yourself. For example, if you read an article you like, you might decide to copy and paste some text from it as a quote and link to it in a social media post. As you’ve extracted information from the site the article was posted on, you’ve scraped it. Usually, though, web scraping is done by computer programs. That’s because computers can do things much quicker than us humans. So how does a web scraper work? It’s usually made up of two parts, a crawler and the scraper itself, that work together. The crawler finds the URLs you want to scrape and downloads their HTML files. The scraper then finds the information of interest in the HTML file and extracts it, storing it in, for example, a spreadsheet. If you know how to code, you can build your own scrapers from scratch. But you don’t need to be a skilled programmer to get up and running with web scraping – a quick Google search reveals plenty of pre-built scrapers that can be used without any programming knowledge. The information you get from web scraping can be incredibly valuable. For example, it allows companies to get data about their competitor’s prices, which they can then use to adjust their own. It can also be used to identify sites that are violating copyright by hosting stolen content or selling counterfeit goods so that appropriate action can be taken. Web scraping is even valuable to scientific researchers who often need to obtain and analyze data, such as coroner’s reports or clinical trial data, as scraping can make getting the information much faster. Content stealing sites also use scrapers, but for the malicious purpose of copying original articles from legitimate websites or from their RSS feeds. Then they create their own website and post the stolen content as their own, getting credit for other peoples’ hard work. This hurts the websites that you love and can also lead to legal troubles and hefty financial penalties for the content stealers. Why do content thieves steal content and try to pass it off as their own? Because unfortunately there are plenty of ways for them to make a profit doing so. The most obvious ones are advertising and affiliate links. But there is another lucrative, but illicit, option: selling backlinks. So what is a backlink? Suppose you have a website and I have a blog. In one of my blog posts, I might cite a piece of information I found on your website and so include a link back to it. That link is called a backlink to your website. Backlinks are a valuable commodity because they signal to search engines that your site has useful content. If lots of reputable websites link to you, then search engines are likely to rank your website higher in their search results. That’s why one of the main tasks of search engine optimization (SEO) is to build a high quality backlink profile. Not all backlinks will help you rank higher in search engine rankings, though. For example, if a site links to you as part of a paid advertisement, Google requires them to give this link either a ‘ nofollow ’ or a ‘ sponsored ’ attribute. These attributes tell Google that they should not count these links when determining how to rank your site (though they do use them as “ hints ”). After all, if a backlink has been paid for, the site linked to you because they were paid, not because they found your content useful. So how do you build up a high quality backlink profile? Google’s advice is to “is to create unique, relevant content that can naturally gain popularity in the internet community”. Doing this successfully requires a lot of ingenuity, time and effort. For those wanting a quicker and easier approach with money to burn, buying backlinks without the ‘nofollow’ or ‘sponsored’ attributes is an attractive option. It is not without its risks, however. If Google determines that you’re buying or selling backlinks without the appropriate attributes then your site’s ranking will suffer or it may even disappear from Google’s search results altogether. But plenty of backlink buyers and sellers are undeterred by the threat of penalties from Google. The SEO industry, of which backlink selling is a part, is a huge one, estimated to be worth approximately $80 billion dollars. While the size of the backlink selling industry in particular doesn’t seem to have been fully investigated, Joshua Hardwick, Head of Content at SEO software company Ahrefs, told TechRadar Pro that “it does seem like it’s quite a popular way to get backlinks simply because getting backlinks is difficult to do in a legitimate way”. For example, Nathan Gotch, of Gotch SEO, describes how he earned more than $470,998 selling backlinks to 507 new customers from 2017 to 2019. Though Gotch is no longer in the backlink selling industry, plenty of other SEO agencies continue to sell backlinks and freelancer sites like Fiverr have an abundance of backlink sellers offering their services.
