Sometimes I am amazed that how similar the Internet is to our real world. If you take a look at hierarchy of people in world, it is –

1. Hard Working People who do things By the Rulebook to earn decent wages to keep things going.
2. Mavericks who have others work for them and still make more money than them.
3. Thieves who leech on the success of others.

Same way, the very same categories of people exist who make their money on the internet.

1. There are honest webmasters who work hard to create great quality content and promote it the right way.
2. There are Mavericks who leverage the power of technology and outsourcing.
3. There are thieves who leech on the hard work of the above two categories of people.

And one really dirty thing that this third variety does is — Content Scraping.

Content scraping is nothing more than taking content from other sites and putting it on your site — usually using automated techniques and that too in wholesale quantities.

Now if you talk to these people who indulge in such activities, they can easily give you a list of 10 ways this might help the person they are stealing content from.

Guess what? The benefits they make you count are same as if you snatch a bag of gold coins from a person and give him a lollypop in return and tell him that he atleast got a lollypop by getting his bag of gold coins snatched.

And the biggest benefit they count of link-back is again useless as Google doesn’t give much weight to links from spam sites.

Not only is this practice illegal but it is also extremely frustrating. Here’s another rant about the thing.

Seriously folks, take some time to create original content rather than steal from others. It’s lot more profitable in long run.