I’ve had many discussions with others lately about websites that focus on providing user-contributed content… and in those conversations, one of the topics that invariably comes up is how to come up with the initial content required to attract users to a new web site.
While some sites continue to grow organically, attracting users by word-of-mouth and link-of-google for the limited content they already have, a new practice has been spreading like the plague for sites that seek to obtain user-contributed content (UCC): ‘data’ scraping.
My personal opinion: the only time it’s okay to scrape data is when it’s actually “data” – e.g., addresses, events, etc. Scraping conversations or articles – content that people took the time and energy to craft – even though it may be legal, just isn’t right. But I’ve come across this practice with increasing frequency over the past few months… and every site I’ve come across that engages in this practice or -even worse – uses it as their business model – has been put on my blacklist (e.g., BigResource, etc.).
Reasoning? It takes 10 sec. for a page to load. After I’ve seen 6 pages in a row that have the same exact content, I’ve wasted over a minute of my life, and want to throttle someone. And when the first 3 pages of results on google are all links to the same two pieces of content, it makes me want to run down to the Googleplex, and defeated, drop to my knees, and bang my fists on the ground, while crying “Why, Sergei, Why?????”
Okay, it’s not quite that bad… but it wastes my time, and chances are, will frustrate your user. And since first impressions are the ones that last, if the first impression a user gets of your site is one that makes them vow not to use your site again, you’ll end up far less successful than if you were to wait and allow your content to grow organically.
A better option: look for topics that haven’t been covered elsewhere (or at least topics that aren’t easily found through google), and ask and answer the questions yourself (maybe even using a different account so it looks ‘real’) with a mind towards SEO. Because if you don’t have any value to add to the space other than aggregating or snagging content from other sites, why would a user return to your site instead of the originator?
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