Tuesday, 30 December 2014

Web Data Scraping Services At Lowest Rate For Business Directory

We are the world's most trusted provider directory, your business data scrape, and scrape email scraping and sending the data needed. We scour the entire directory database or doctors, lawyers, brokers, financial advisers, etc. As the scraping of a particular industry category wise database scraping or data that can be adapted.

We are pioneers in the worldwide web scraping and data services. We must understand the value of our customer database, we email id with the greatest effort to collect data. We are lawyers, doctors, brokers, realtors, schools, students, universities, IT managers, pubs, bars, nightclubs, dance clubs, financial advisers, liquor stores, Face book, Twitter, pharmaceutical companies, mortgage broker scraped data, accounting firms, car dealers , artists, shop health and job portals.

Our business database development services to try and get real quality at the lowest possible industry. Example worked. We have a quick turnaround time can be a business mailing database. Our business database development services to try and get real quality at the lowest possible industry. Example worked. We have a quick turnaround time can be a business mailing database.

We are the world's most trusted provider directory, your business data scrape, and scrape email scraping and sending the data needed. We scour the entire directory database or doctors, lawyers, brokers, financial advisers, etc., as the scraping of a particular industry category wise database scraping or data that can be adapted.

We are pioneers in the worldwide web scraping and data services. We must understand the value of our customer database, we email id with the greatest effort to collect data. We are lawyers, doctors, brokers, realtors, schools, students, universities, IT managers, pubs, bars, nightclubs, dance clubs, financial advisers, liquor stores, Face book, Twitter, pharmaceutical companies, mortgage broker scraped data, accounting firms, car dealers , artists, shop health and job portals.

What a great resource for specific information or content with little success to gather and have tried to organize themselves in a folder? You no longer need to worry, and data processing services through our website search are the best solution for your problem.

We currently have an "information explosion" phase of the walk, where there is so much information and content information for an event or a small group of channels.

Order without the benefit of you and your customers a little truth to that information. You use information and material is easy to organize in a way that is needed. Something other than a small business guide, simply create a separate folder in less than an hour.

Our technology-specific Web database for you to a similar configuration and database development to use. In addition, we finished our services can help you through the data to identify the sources of information for web pages to follow. This is a cost effective way to create a database.

We offer directory database, company name, address, the state, country, phone, email and website URL to take. In recent projects we have completed. We have a quick turnaround time can be a business mailing database. Our business database development services to try and get real quality at the lowest possible industry.

Source:http://www.articlesbase.com/outsourcing-articles/web-data-scraping-services-at-lowest-rate-for-business-directory-5757029.html

Sunday, 28 December 2014

What Kind of Legal Problems Can Web Scraping Cause

Web scraping software is readily available and has been used by many for legitimate purposes. It has also been used for illegal purposes. A website that engages in this practice should know the legal dangers of the activity.

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Black Hat SEO Popular Techniques

General Knowledge- VII

The idea of web scraping is not new. Search engines have used this type of software to determine which results appear when someone conducts a search. They use special software software to extract data from a website and this data is then used to calculate the rankings of the website. Websites work very hard to improve their ranking and their chance of being found by anyone making a search. This use of this practice is understood and is considered to be a legitimate use for the software. However, there are services that provide web scraping and screen scraping prevention services and help the webmaster to remain safe from the attack of bad bots.

The problem with duplicacy is that it is often used for less than legitimate reasons. Since the software responsible can collect all sorts of data from websites and store the information that is collected, it represents a danger to anyone who might be affected by it. The information that can be collected can be used for many practices that are not so legitimate and may even be illegal. Anyone who is involved in this practice of content duplicacy should be aware of the legal issues implicated with this practice. It may be wise for anyone who has a website to find ways to prevent a site from being scraped or to use professional services to block site scraping.

Legal problems

The first thing to worry about, if you have a website or are using web scraping software, is when you might run into legal problems. Some of the issues that web scraping can cause include:

•    Access. If the software is used to access sites it does not have the right to access and takes information that it is not entitled to, the owner of the web scarping software may find themselves in legal trouble.

•    Re-use. The software can collect and reuse information. If that information is copyrighted, that might be a legal problem. Any information that is reused without permission may create legal issues for anyone who uses it.

•    Robots. Some states have enacted laws that are designed to keep people from using scraping robots. These automatically search out information on websites and using them may be illegal in some states. It is up to the user of the web scraping software to comply with any laws in the state in which they are operating.

Who is Responsible

The laws and regulations surrounding this practice are not always clear. There are many grey areas that allow this practice to occur. The question is, who is responsible for determining whether the use of web scraping software is legal?

Websites collect the information, but they may not be the entity using the web scraping software. If they are using this type of software, it is not always enough to inform the website's visitors that this practice is occurring. Putting this information into the user agreement may or may not protect the website from legal problems.

It is also partly the responsibility of a site owner to prevent a site from being scraped. There is software that can be used that will do this for a website and will keep any information that is collected safe and secure. A website may or may not be held legally responsible for any web scraper that is able to collect information they have. It will depend on why the data was collected, how it was used, who collected it, and whether precautions were taken.

What to expect

The issue of content copying and the legal issues surrounding it will continue to evolve. As more courts take on this issue, the lines between legal and illegal web scraping will become clearer. Many of the cases that have been brought to court have occurred in civil court, although there are some that have been taken up in a criminal court. There will be times when such practice may actually be a felony.

Before you use spying software, you need to realize that the laws surrounding its use are not clear. If you operate a website, you need to know the legal issues that you may face if scraping software is used on your website. The best step is to use the software available to protect your website and stop web scraping and be honest on your site if web scraping is used.

Source: http://www.articlesbase.com/technology-articles/what-kind-of-legal-problems-can-web-scraping-cause-6780486.html

Thursday, 25 December 2014

Central Qld Coal: Mining for Needed Investments

The Central Qld Coal Project is situated in the Galilee Coal Basin, Central Queensland with the purpose of establishing a mine to service international export markets for thermal coal. An estimated cost to such a project would be around $ 7.5 billion - the amount proves that the mining industry is one serious business to begin with.

In addition to the mine, the Central Qld Coal Project also proposes to construct a railway, potentially in excess of 400km depending on the final option: Either to transport processed coal to an expanded facility at Abbot Point or new export terminal to be established at Dudgeon Point. However, this would require new major water and power supply infrastructure to service the mine and port - hence, the extremely high cost. Because mining areas usually involve desolate areas where there is no direct risk to developed regions where the populace thrives, setting up new major water and power supplies would simply demand costs as high as the estimated cost - but this is not the only major percent of the whole budget of the Central Qld Coal Project.

The location for the Central Qld Coal Project is situated 40km northwest of Alpha, approximately 450 km west of Rockhampton and contains an amount of more than three billion tons. The proposed open-cut mine of the Central Qld Coal Project is expected to be developed in stages. It shall have an initial export capacity of 30 million tons per annum with a mine life expectancy of 30 years.

In terms of employment regarding Central Qld Coal Project, there will be around a total of 2,500 people to be employed during the construction and 1,600 permanent positions shall be employed in the operation stage of the Central Qld Coal Project.

Australia is a major coal exporter - the largest exporter of coal and fourth largest producer of coal. Australia is also the second largest producer of gold, second only to China. As for Opal, Australia is responsible for 95% of its production, thereby making her the largest producer worldwide. Australia would not also lose in terms of commercially viable diamond deposits - being third next after Russia and Botswana. This pretty much explains the significance of the mining industry to Australia. It is like the backbone of its economy; an industry focused on claiming the blessings the earth has giver her lands. The Central Qld Coal Project was made to further the exports and improve the trade. However, the Central Qld Coal Project requires quite a large sum for its project. It is only through the financial support of investments, both local and international, can it achieve its goals and begin reaping the fruits of the land.

Source: http://ezinearticles.com/?Central-Qld-Coal:-Mining-for-Needed-Investments&id=6314576

Monday, 22 December 2014

GScholarXScraper: Hacking the GScholarScraper function with XPath

Kay Cichini recently wrote a word-cloud R function called GScholarScraper on his blog which when given a search string will scrape the associated search results returned by Google Scholar, across pages, and then produce a word-cloud visualisation.

This was of interest to me because around the same time I posted an independent Google Scholar scraper function  get_google_scholar_df() which does a similar job of the scraping part of Kay’s function using XPath (whereas he had used Regular Expressions). My function worked as follows: when given a Google Scholar URL it will extract as much information as it can from each search result on the URL webpage  into different columns of a dataframe structure.

In the comments of his blog post I figured it’d be fun to hack his function to provide an XPath alternative, GScholarXScraper. Essensially it’s still the same function he wrote and therefore full credit should go to Kay on this one as he fully deserves it – I certainly had no previous idea how to make a word cloud, plus I hadn’t used the tm package in ages (to the point where I’d forgotten most of it!). The main changes I made were as follows:

    Restructure internal code of GScholarScraper into a series of local functions which each do a seperate job (this made it easier for me to hack because I understood what was doing what and why).

    As far as possible, strip out Regular Expressions and replace with XPath alternatives (made possible via the XML package). Hence the change of name to GScholarXScraper. Basically, apart from a little messing about with the generation of the URLs I just copied over my get_google_scholar_df() function and removed the Regular Expression alternatives. I’m not saying one is better than the other but f0r me personally, I find XPath shorter and quicker to code but either is a good approach for web scraping like this (note to self: I really need to lean more about regular expressions!) :)

•    Vectorise a few of the loops I saw (it surprises me how second nature this has become to me – I used to find the *apply family of functions rather confusing but thankfully not so much any more!).
•    Make use of getURL from the RCurl package (I was getting some mutibyte string problems originally when using readLines but this approach automatically fixed it for me).
•    Add option to make a word-cloud from either the “title” or the “description” fields of the Google Scholar search results
•    Added steaming via the Rstem package because I couldn’t get the Snowball package to install with my version of java. This was important to me because I was getting word clouds with variations of the same word on it e.g. “game”, “games”, “gaming”.
•    Forced use of URLencode() on generation of URLs to automatically avoid problems with search terms like “Baldur’s Gate” which would otherwise fail.

I think that’s pretty much everything I added. Anyway, here’s how it works (link to full code at end of post):

</pre>
<div id="LC198"># #EXAMPLE 1: Display word cloud based on the title field of each Google Scholar search result returned</div>
<div id="LC199"># GScholarXScraper(search.str = "Baldur's Gate", field = "title", write.table = FALSE, stem = TRUE)</div>
<div id="LC200">#</div>
<div id="LC201"># # word freq</div>
<div id="LC202"># # game game 71</div>
<div id="LC203"># # comput comput 22</div>
<div id="LC204"># # video video 13</div>
<div id="LC205"># # learn learn 11</div>
<div id="LC206"># # [TRUNC...]</div>
<div id="LC207"># #</div>
<div id="LC208"># #</div>
<div id="LC209"># # Number of titles submitted = 210</div>
<div id="LC210"># #</div>
<div id="LC211"># # Number of results as retrieved from first webpage = 267</div>
<div id="LC212"># #</div>
<div id="LC213"># # Be aware that sometimes titles in Google Scholar outputs are truncated - that is why, i.e., some mandatory intitle-search strings may not be contained in all titles</div>

<pre>

// image

I think that’s kind of cool and corresponds to what I would expect for a search about the legendary Baldur’s Gate computer role playing game :)  The following is produced if we look at the ‘description’ filed instead of the ‘title’ field:

</pre>

<div id="LC215"># # EXAMPLE 2: Display word cloud based on the description field of each Google Scholar search result returned</div>
<div id="LC216">GScholarXScraper(search.str = "Baldur's Gate", field = "description", write.table = FALSE, stem = TRUE)</div>
<div id="LC217">#</div>
<div id="LC218"># # word freq</div>
<div id="LC219"># # page page 147</div>
<div id="LC220"># # gate gate 132</div>
<div id="LC221"># # game game 130</div>
<div id="LC222"># # baldur baldur 129</div>
<div id="LC223"># # roleplay roleplay 21</div>
<div id="LC224"># # [TRUNC...]</div>
<div id="LC225"># #</div>
<div id="LC226"># # Number of titles submitted = 210</div>
<div id="LC227"># #</div>
<div id="LC228"># # Number of results as retrieved from first webpage = 267</div>
<div id="LC229"># #</div>
<div id="LC230"># # Be aware that sometimes titles in Google Scholar outputs are truncated - that is why, i.e., some mandatory intitle-search strings may not be contained in all titles</div>
<pre>

//image

Not bad. I could see myself using the text mining and word cloud functionality with other projects I’ve been playing with such as Facebook, Google+, Yahoo search pages, Google search pages, Bing search pages… could be fun!

Many thanks again to Kay for making his code publicly available so that I could play with it and improve my programming skill set.

Code:

Full code for GScholarXScraper can be found here: https://github.com/tonybreyal/Blog-Reference-Functions/blob/master/R/GScholarXScraper/GScholarXScraper

Original GSchloarScraper code is here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1w_7niLqTUT0hmLxMfPEB7pGiA6MXoZBy6qPsKsEe_O0/edit?hl=en_US

Full code for just the XPath scraping function is here: https://github.com/tonybreyal/Blog-Reference-Functions/blob/master/R/googleScholarXScraper/googleScholarXScraper.R

Source:http://www.r-bloggers.com/gscholarxscraper-hacking-the-gscholarscraper-function-with-xpath/

Friday, 19 December 2014

Extractions and Skin Care

As an esthetician or skin care professional, you may have heard some controversy over the matter of performing extractions during a routine facial service. What may seem like a relatively simple procedure can actually raise great controversy in the world of esthetics. Some estheticians regard extractions as a matter of providing a complete service while others see this as inflicting trauma to the skin. Learning more about both sides of the issue can help you as a professional in making an informed decision and explaining the issue to your clients.

What is an extraction?

As a basic review, an extraction is removing impurity (plug of dead skin or oil) from a pore or pimple. It is the removal of both blackheads and whiteheads from the skin. Extractions occur after the skin has been thoroughly cleansed, exfoliated and sometimes steamed to soften the area prior to extraction.

Why Do It?

Extractions are considered a "must" by many estheticians when performing a routine facial because they want to leave their clients skin looking and feeling it's best. When done correctly, a simple extraction should be quick and relatively painless. As a trained esthetician it is important to know if your client has sensitive skin which would make them more prone to the damage that can be caused by extractions.

Why Not?

Extractions should only be performed by a trained esthetician and should not be done in excess. Extractions can cause broken capillaries or sin irritations that can lead to more (not less) breakouts. Extractions can also cause discomfort for your client when done incorrectly so you should seek their permission before performing any type of extraction during their facial. Remember your client has the right to know any product or procedure being performed on their skin and make an informed choice.

Who Decides?

As an esthetician it may be entirely up to you or it may be a procedure within your salon to do or not do extractions. It is important to check the guidelines of your employer and know their policies before performing any procedure. Remember to explain extractions and their benefits and possible complications to your client. Trust is an important part of any relationship and your client needs to know you are being open and honest with them. The last thing you want as a professional is a reputation for inflicting unnecessary and unwanted procedures or damage to your client's skin.

Bellanina Institute's owner and director, Nina Howard, is a multi-talented, forward-thinking entrepreneur who has built the Bellanina brand form the ground up to a successful million-dollar spa, spa training business, and skin care product line. Nina is a Licensed Esthetician with Para-Medical studies, Massage Therapist, Polarity Therapist, Skin Care Educator, Artist, and Professional Interior Designer.

Source:http://ezinearticles.com/?Extractions-and-Skin-Care&id=5271715

Wednesday, 17 December 2014

Benefits of Predictive Analytics and Data Mining Services

Predictive Analytics is the process of dealing with variety of data and apply various mathematical formulas to discover the best decision for a given situation. Predictive analytics gives your company a competitive edge and can be used to improve ROI substantially. It is the decision science that removes guesswork out of the decision-making process and applies proven scientific guidelines to find right solution in the shortest time possible.

Predictive analytics can be helpful in answering questions like:

•    Who are most likely to respond to your offer?
•    Who are most likely to ignore?
•    Who are most likely to discontinue your service?
•    How much a consumer will spend on your product?
•    Which transaction is a fraud?
•    Which insurance claim is a fraudulent?
•    What resource should I dedicate at a given time?

Benefits of Data mining include:

•    Better understanding of customer behavior propels better decision
•    Profitable customers can be spotted fast and served accordingly
•    Generate more business by reaching hidden markets
•    Target your Marketing message more effectively
•    Helps in minimizing risk and improves ROI.
•    Improve profitability by detecting abnormal patterns in sales, claims, transactions etc
•    Improved customer service and confidence
•    Significant reduction in Direct Marketing expenses

Basic steps of Predictive Analytics are as follows:

•    Spot the business problem or goal
•    Explore various data sources such as transaction history, user demography, catalog details, etc)
•    Extract different data patterns from the above data
•    Build a sample model based on data & problem
•    Classify data, find valuable factors, generate new variables
•    Construct a Predictive model using sample
•    Validate and Deploy this Model

Standard techniques used for it are:

•    Decision Tree
•    Multi-purpose Scaling
•    Linear Regressions
•    Logistic Regressions
•    Factor Analytics
•    Genetic Algorithms
•    Cluster Analytics
•    Product Association

Should you have any queries regarding Data Mining or Predictive Analytics applications, please feel free to contact us. We would be pleased to answer each of your queries in detail.

Source:http://ezinearticles.com/?Benefits-of-Predictive-Analytics-and-Data-Mining-Services&id=4766989

Monday, 15 December 2014

RAM Scraping a New Old Favorite For Hackers

Some of the best stories involve a conflict with an old enemy: a friend-turned-foe, long thought dead, returning from the grave for violent retribution; an ancient order of dark siders from the distant reaches of the galaxy, hiding in plain sight and waiting to seize power for themselves; a dark lord thought destroyed millennia ago, only to rise again and seek his favorite piece of jewelry.  The list goes on.

Granted, 2011 isn’t quite “millennia,” and this story isn’t meant for entertainment, but the old foe in this instance is nonetheless dangerous in its own right.  That is the year when RAM scraping malware first made major headlines: originating as an advanced version of the Trackr malware, controlled through a botnet, it was discovered in the compromised Point of Sale (POS) systems of a university and several hotels.  And while it seemed recently that this method had dwindled in popularity, the Target and other retail breaches saw it return with a vengeance.  With 110 million Target customers having their information compromised, it was easily one the largest incidents involving memory scrapers.

How does it work?  First, the malware has to be introduced into the POS network, which can happen via any machine that is connected to the network, or unsecured wireless networks.  Even with firewalls, an infected laptop could serve as a vector.  Once installed, the malware can hide in the shadows, employing encryption or antivirus-avoiding tools to prevent its identification until it’s ready to strike.  Then, when a customer’s card gets used at a POS machine, the data contained within—name, card number, security code, etc.—gets sent to the system memory.  “There is that opportunity to steal the credit card information when it is in memory, perhaps even before your payment has even been authorized, and the data hasn't even been written to the hard drive yet,” says security researcher Graham Cluley.

So, why not encrypt the system’s memory, when it’s at its most vulnerable?  Not that simple, sadly: “No matter how strong your encryption is, if the system needs to process data or process the code, everything needs to be decrypted in memory,” Chris Elisan, principal malware scientist at security firm RSA, explained to Dark Reading.

There are certain steps a company can take, of course, and should take, to reduce the risk.  Strong passwords to access the POS machines, firewalls to isolate the POS network from the Internet, disabling remote access to POS systems, to name a few.  All the same, while these measures are vital and should be used, I don’t think, in light of recent breaches, they are sufficient.  Now, I wrote a short time ago about the impending October 2014 deadline imposed by the credit card industry, regarding the systematic switch to chipped credit card technology; adopting this standard will definitely assist in eradicating this problem.  But, until such a time when a widespread implementation of new systems comes about, always be vigilant to protect your data from attack, because what’s old is new again, and a colossal data breach is a story consumers are liable to seek financial restitution for.

Source:http://www.netlib.com/blog/application-security/RAM-Scraping-a-New-Old-Favorite-For-Hackers.asp

Saturday, 13 December 2014

Microfinance Data Scraping

I went to the Datakind‘s New York Datadive last November and met the Microfinance Information Exchange (MIX), a group that ‘delivers data services, analysis, research and business information on the institutions that provide financial services to the world’s poor’. They wanted to see whether web-scraping could save them from manually gathering data. So fellow divers and I showed MIX the utility of web-scraping. Over the course of a day, about six people scraped data about microfinance institutions from a bunch of websites, saving MIX an estimated year of manual data entry.

Over the past few months, I worked further with MIX to study who has access to what sorts of financial services. DataKind just put up our blog post about the project. Read the post, or just look at the map and explore the data.

Source:https://blog.scraperwiki.com/2012/05/microfinance-data-scraping/

Friday, 12 December 2014

Content Scraping Reuses Blog Posts without Permission

What do popular blogs and websites such as Social Media Examiner, Copy Blogger, CNN.com, Mashable, and Type A Parent have in common? No, it’s not traffic and a loyal online community, each was a victim of the content scraping site “BuzzMyFx.” Although most bloggers fall victim to content scrapers at least once, the offending website was such an extreme case the backlash against it was fast and furious. Thanks to the quick action of many angry bloggers, BuzzMyFix was taken down in a matter of days.

If you’re not familiar with content scraping sites and aren’t sure why they’re bad and what you can do if you fall prey, read on. Not knowing what steps you can take to remove your content from a scraping site can mean someone else is profiting from your hard work.

What is content scraping?

Content scraping is when a blog or website pulls in other bloggers’ content without permission, in many cases passing it off as their own. Instead of stocking their sites with unique content, they steal entire blog posts. Some do leave the original authors’ bylines, but there are plenty that don’t provide attribution at all. This is not a good thing at all.

If you don’t care about someone taking your content and putting it on their blogs and websites without your permission, you should. These sites are stealing traffic, search engine rankings, and even advertising revenue from bloggers. Moreover, by ignoring scraping sites you’re giving the message that this practice is OK.

It’s not OK.

How was BuzzMyFx different?

BuzzMyFx was a little different from your usual scrapers. Bloggers didn’t just find their content had been posted on this site, they learned their entire blogs — down to the design and comments — had been cloned. Plus, any bloggers checking to see if their blogs were being cloned immediately found themselves being scraped as well. Dozens, if not hundreds of blogs were affected. However, bloggers didn’t take this incident sitting down. They spread the word and contacted the site’s host en masse. Thanks to their swift action, and the high number of complaints, the site was removed quickly.

How can I tell if my content is being scraped?

Fortunately for content creators, scrapers are a lazy bunch. Because their sites are automated, and they don’t check or read the content being pulled, they don’t take many precautions to ensure the people they scrape from don’t find their sites. In fact, they may not even care. Fortunately, this makes it easy to learn if your content is being stolen.

    Link to your own articles — When you write a blog post and link to other (of your own) blog posts within that post, it’s not only good SEO. You also will get pingbacks whenever someone else steals your content because of your interlinks. You’re alerted when someone links to your content, and when content is published with your links, you’ll get that alert.

    Google Alerts — If your name, blog’s name, or other unique keywords are set up as Google Alerts, you’ll receive an e-mail every time content is published with these keywords.

    Analytics — When people click on your links that are in scraped content, it will show up as referring traffic in your analytics program. You should always check referring traffic so you can thank the referring site owner, but also to make sure no one is stealing your content.

What steps can I take to remove my content from a scraper?

If you find your content is being stolen, know you have several options. First, you’ll need to find out who owns the scraping site. You can find this out by doing a WHOis domain lookup, which will enable you to search for the website’s details, including the name of the webmaster, contact info, and the name of the site’s host.

Keep in mind that sometimes the website’s owner will pay extra to have his or her name kept private, but you will always be able to find the name of the host. Once you have this information, you can take the necessary steps to have your content removed.

    Contact the site’s owner personally: Your first step should always be a polite request to remove your content immediately. Let the website owner know he or she is in violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), and you will take the necessary steps to report him if he doesn’t comply.

    Contact the site’s host: If you can’t find the name of the person who owns the site, or if he won’t comply with your takedown request, contact the website’s host. You’ll have to prove your content is being stolen. As the host can be held liable for allowing the content theft, it’s in their best interest to contact the website owner and request removal.

    Contact Google: You can contact Google and fill out a form to have them remove the website from their search engines.

    Spread the word: Let all your blogging friends know about content scrapers when you come across them. The more people who take action against content scrapers, the less likely they are to do it again.

Contacting the webmaster with a takedown notice doesn’t have to be an intimidating process, either. The website Plagiarism Today has a wonderful set of stock letters to use to contact webmasters, web hosts, and even Google. All you have to do is insert the necessary information.

Content scrapers and cloners may try to steal your content, but you don’t have to let them. Stand up for what’s yours.

Source: http://www.dummies.com/how-to/content/content-scraping-reuses-blog-posts-without-permiss.html

Monday, 8 December 2014

Finding & Removing Spam Blogs Who Scrape Content Onto Free Hosted Blogs

The more popular you become in the blogging world, the more crap you have to deal with!
Content scraping is one chore that can be dealt with swiftly once you understand what to do.
This post contains links which you can use to quickly and easily report content scrapers and spam blogs.
Please share this post and help clean up spam blogs and punish content scrapers.
First step is to find your url’s which have been scraped of content and then get the scrapers spam blog removed.

Some of the tools i use to do this are:

    Google Webmaster Tools
    Google Alerts

Finding Scraped Content
Login to your Google Webmaster Tools account and go to traffic > links to your site.
You should see something like this:
Webmaster Tools Links to Your Site

The first domain is a site which has copied and embedded my homepage which i have already dealt with.
The second site is a search engine.
The third domain is the one i want to deal with.

A common method scrapers use is to post the scraped content from your rss feed on to a free hosted blog like WordPress.com or blogger.com.

Once you click the WordPress.com link in webmaster tools, you’ll find all the url’s which have been scraped.
Links to Your Site

There’s 32 url’s which have been linked to so its simply a matter of clicking each of your links and finding the culprits.

The first link is my homepage which has been linked to by legit domains like WordPress developers.
The others are mainly linked to by spam blogs who have scraped the content and used a free hosted service which in this case is WordPress.com.
WordPress.com Links to Your Site
 Reporting & Removing Spam Blogs

Once you have the url’s of the content scraping blogs as seen in the screenshot above:

    Fill in this basic form to report spam to WordPress.com
    Fill in this form to report copyright content to WordPress.com
    Use this form to report Blogspot and Blogger.com content which has been scraped.
    Fill in one of these forms to remove content from Google

Google Alerts

Its very easy to setup a Google alert to find your post titles when they get scraped.
If you’ve setup the WordPress SEO plugin correctly, you should have included your site title at the end of all your post titles.
Then all you need to do is setup a Google alert for your site title and you’ll be notified every time a scraper links to your content.

Link Notifications

You may also receive a pingback or trackback if you have this feature enabled in your discussion settings.

Link Notifications
RSS Feed Links

Most content scrapers use automated software to scrape the content from RSS feeds.
Make sure you configure your Reading settings so only a summary is displayed.
Reading Settings Feed Summary

Next step is to configure the settings in Yoast’s SEO plugin so links back to your site are included in all RSS feed post summaries.

RSS Feed Links

This will help search engines identify you and your domain as the original author of the content.
There’s other services like copyscape and dmca which can help you protect your sites content if you’re prepared to pay a premium.
That’s it folks.
Its easy to find and get spam sites removed once you know what to do.
Hope you don’t have to deal with this garbage to often.
Ever found out your content has been scraped?
What did you do about it?

Source: http://wpsites.net/blogging/content-scraping-monitoring-and-prevention-tips/

Monday, 1 December 2014

What you have to know before requesting web scraping services?

Before you request web scraping services you have to know what are your needs (what data you need, structure of it and where you can find this data).

Step 1: Define what data you need?

Data needs depending on purpose, if you want to find new customers you probably need contact data from players in your industry. Also if you want to study your competitors you need to define who are they. Only after that you can select data sources (websites feeds or other electronic sources) for this extraction.

In many cases for discovering and defining data sources are used search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo, and others.

Step 2: Structure of data

Data structure it’s directly linked to usage purpose. In many cases data structure it’s a table where a row represents an entity and a cell of this row represents a property of this entity. In other cases Data structure is a a chart or another graphic representation builder with data extracted from a web source.

Step 3: Number of data extraction

In many cases is needed one time data extraction. In other cases when you need a regular report, are needed periodically extractions.

If you have defined all of above points you are ready to request a quote and an amount estimation from this contact form.

Source: http://thewebminer.com/blog/2013/08/