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Should I spend time fighting scrapers or improving content?

Should I spend time fighting scrapers or improving content? - answered by Matt Cutts

Matt's answer:

MATT CUTTS: All right, today’s webmaster question comes from Sunny in Mumbai, India. Sunny wants to know– Hi, Matt. I understand that the recent farmer update– which some people mention regarding Panda– gives a penalty for poor content. Given the penalty, scrapers have been outranking original sites. Should webmasters spend time in fighting scrapers directly or work on the poor content? Thanks. So my advice would be to really concentrate on the quality of your own site. It is the case that sometimes scrapers can be returned in Google search results despite our best efforts. And it is the case that sometimes you see scrapers more or less often. But it’s also the case that Google has been working on trying to find and fix the problems related to scrapers. So we’ve got engineers working on that. They’re going to keep working on that. We’ve actually got some good stuff in the pipeline that I’m pretty excited about. So if you think about it, the fundamental problem– if you’re affected by this particular algorithm update– is that Google is thinking that your site is not providing as high quality content as some other sites. So the best thing to do is to concentrate on the root of the issue, to concentrate on trying to make sure that you’ve got the highest quality content so that Google sees that and can assess that. And then you don’t have to worry nearly as much about the scrapers, because you’re doing much better. So we’ll keep working on the scraper side of things. My advice for people who might have been affected by the farmer or the Panda Update is to concentrate primarily more on the quality side, the content side, thinking about how can you either improve the quality of the content. If there’s some part of your site that’s got especially low-quality content or stuff that was really not all that useful, then it might make sense to not have that content on your site, things along those lines. Hope that helps. And good luck.

by Matt Cutts - Google's Head of Search Quality Team

 

Original video: