So, I fully understand the licensing of WPSE content; however, what is the general thought toward content scrapers scraping WPSE answers?
For instance, I found this site had scraped this answer, when the scraped content sent a pingback to a page I had linked.
Was anyone aware of sites doing this? Are we cool with it? Should we just ignore it?
I was aware of it, actually. Several times when I'm looking for the answer to a programming question I Google it first, and tend to end up on a scraper's website. When I click "read answers" or whatever flavor of link they append, I'm usually directed to Stack Overflow or one of the SE sites.
On the one hand, it's frustrating to see someone else re-publish your work without your knowledge. But that's what the licensing of the site allows, to it's kind of the cost of doing business in a public forum.
On the other hand, many content scrapers link back to the site they scraped from. Which means they're becoming just that many more entry points to the site (i.e. someone Googles, gets scraper site, and follows it back here).
So when I weigh the pros and cons, I'm irritated but accepting ... in the end, I'm essentially cool with it and generally ignore it.
I vaguely remember from somewhere that the one case when higher SE powers could (should?) be poked is if you see scraped post/site outranking original one in search results.
Other than that - ignore it.
This was addressed by Stack vs Google a while back. If I remember it was the users complaining to Google and not Stack. It was at one point ( last year?) highly annoying that sites with higher ranks would be the first slew of links, in same cases the whole page being lame ad driven link farms.
I remember switching to http://ddg.gg/ for a while, it was so bad.
Finally Google made a major update called Panda and whacked a bunch, but every 6 months or so they creep back into the ranks, it really is a battle for them.
This is extremely helpful and coded by google ( on chrome) https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/nolijncfnkgaikbjbdaogikpmpbdcdef
Even though they have publicly said they don't use that plugin for tweaking the algorithm I hope they secretly do;)
One of the original conversations about this: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2011/01/trouble-in-the-house-of-google.html
Ref: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Panda
ps. It is named Panda for a reason.
As long as they have a link that links back to your post and they are not stealing all the credit I would ignore it.
