How a Website Scraper Affects Your SEO
How a Website Scraper Affects Your SEO
What is Web Scraping?
Web scraping is the technique of extracting data from websites. You just need to write a piece of code to perform the process of scraping. The code used in this process is known as “scraper”. The data used for scrapping can contain anything ranging from images, videos, product items, and contact information etc. It is a technique for targeted, automated extraction of information from websites. The similar extraction can also be performed manually but web scraping s usually considered faster, more efficient and less error-prone to automate the task.
How a Web Scraper Harms Your Website’s SEO
Here are the potential risks that a web scraper creates for your website’s performance:
- Create duplicate content
Web scrappers basically scan your site, they steal your copy, product information and pricing data. Afterwards they use it on other sites across the web. Google penalize websites that have duplicate content.
- Slow down your page loading speed
When bots and website scrapers access or crawl your site, it slows down your page speed greatly. Google puts great emphasis on page speed when determining the rank of a website. If the speed of your website is too slow, you’ll quickly see a drop in your rankings.
- Drop analytics and traffic
Analytics and traffic data are some of the biggest ways to determine an SEO strategy. When a web scraper attacks your website to copy or steal the data, the content of your website gets invalid, untrue, and invaluable to the Google. When this happens, it also reduces down all the efforts that you have done in the form of SEO to boost up your rankings in search engines.
