Scraping content can be described as the act of picking content from other places on the internet and publishing it as your own work on your website. There are lots of websites out there that contain pieces of content from other websites. Some websites will pick articles from another website and publish them as their own work while others will go as far as copying the entire websites.

This kind of behavior goes against guidelines set by Google as well as copyright laws in the United States and a number of other countries. Most people who scrap content realize that they are doing the wrong thing. So if you do not believe that you are scraping content, then you are probably not.

The Content Strategist of Semalt, Natalia Khachaturyan, says that if you want to steer clear of scraped content, it is advisable to use caution when it comes to displaying information from other websites. Sometimes webmasters may have 'twitter feeds' or 'latest feeds' in their sidebar. It is not necessarily bad. For most cases, displaying such things in your sidebar is fine. However, if you display too much information from too many sources, you are at risk of breaking google guidelines.

This generates the following question, how much is too much? There is no specific answer to this inquiry, but it makes perfect sense that content from other sources need not exceed 10 percent of your web content. A good example would be a typical blog that contains a news feed sidebar. In case your blog posts are too short, then it is likely that your newsfeeds will have more content than your blog.

Consider how a search engine would view such a page. It will conclude that most of your page is filled with content that is not original, or repeated content like your footer and logo. As a result, you're the webpage might not be considered as a great resource for the subject of the content.

You have to know that Google has outlined some examples of what it considers to be scraping. For instance, websites that copy and republish content from other websites without adding any form of content to it or value are considered to be content scrappers. The same applies for sites that copy content from other websites and then modify it slightly, perhaps by substituting in synonyms and then republishing it. They may also try to modify the content using automated techniques such as article spinners.

Similarly, some sites may reproduce constant content feeds from other websites without providing their users with any form of organization or benefits. These are in violation of Google guidelines and can be punished severely for it.

Scraping content does not just stop at written content. The same applies for embedded content such as images, video and other forms of media. In this case, some websites may embed this content from other websites without necessarily adding any substantial value to the user. This as well can be punished severely by search engines. It will only hurt your ranking in search engines, rather than helping it.