Somebody sent me an email via one of my websites that "Someone is posting scrapper content on your site. I only noticed because one of my urls and meta descriptions is on the scape." Now as best I was able to determine this is some kind of web spider/bot used for stealing content and messing with spamming email addresses. How does this happen and is there some CC thingy that can prevent this - without me needing to be a rocket scientist to understand it?

Mike

I'm trying to figure out exactly what you're talking about hehe, I'm not sure what you mean by scrapper content, or what the 'scape' is.
As best as I can figure, you might be talking about the jerk that was putting everyone's name from CC's forums here on their music site, and saying that all those people were music artists that they had helped become recording artists or some such silly thing. He took all the names off, and I'm sure it was some spider/bot type thing that grabbed everyone's names. The names were mostly of people that had nicknames that could be or sounded like real names so they added them.

If this is what you're talking about, I wouldn't worry about it too much, he's taken them all off after being badgered by a few of us to do so.

If this isn't what you're talking about then .... nevermind LOL and clarify a bit more please

Jo Ann-
Scrapper content was something I'd never heard of so I Googled it. Here is a Wiki link I found:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scraper_site that describes it, somewhat. Other references about how to avoid the problem were way over my head, so I'm hoping there is some CC solution I can use.
Incidentally, my co-oped website is http://www.ssr-webspots.com/
I don't see anything there that is a problem, although I'm stronger with graphics/design than coding.
-Mike

Ah I think I understand now. If I understand you correctly, you mean someone has spidered your site and is mirroring it basically and saying it's their site? If so, I'm not sure if there's ways to stop that from happening or not other than searching for them and confronting them. Maybe someone else has ideas on this though.

Here is my advice: I am not sure what kind of hosting environment you work in, but you should have access to information about visitors to your site, which would include those entities attempting to spider your site. If you have that as an option with your hosting, then you should also have the ability to locate which IP addresses are visiting your site. Assuming that there is indeed a stable url that the scrapper is using (which in most cases unless they are hardcore hacks they are stable), then simply block the IP. If you are not privy to this information or don't know how to do the block, then contact your hosting company and they can block it for you.

Just prevent hotlinking of your images and appreciate the free advertising.

I rarely if ever disagree with Tom, but scrapping is a violation of intellectual property rights. People make money off from doing this. I know you were just kidding, but...