What is bot scraping?

Is scrapper illegal?

I would like to know whether scrapper is legal or illegal? And if illegal then what is the punishment? Is scrapper really bad or will I get into trouble? This is a question that I have been meaning to ask for some time. The short answer is no.

The "long" answer is that "scrappers" (aka 'reposters') are not breaking any laws. That being said, there are still repercussions for you, such as: You may get into trouble with your ISP and/or your country's government. Your personal information may be sold to a marketing firm. You may get banned from a few forums and websites for scraping. ? No. Scraping is not illegal, and as pointed out by @Gonzalo and @Jonas, scrapping is not a crime either.

Depending on your country, the punishment might be a fine. There are many instances in which a scrapper gets a warning from the forum/site that they are violating rules.

There is no evidence that scrapping is really bad, and it is not inherently bad. However, this might also be a matter of opinion. In some countries, scrapping might be considered a civil offense (like a parking ticket), while in others, it might be a criminal offense. In some countries, you might not even get a fine for scraping.

As a user, the best thing you can do is make sure that the rules of the site you're scraping do not violate the rules of the site that you are posting. For example, if you are a user of the Stack Exchange network, please don't violate the ToS by using a scraper to collect data on the sites that you visit. Scraping is not illegal. Scrappers (people who use tools to scrape the internet) are very common.

But they have a negative effect on the internet, as they do not respect copyright and they do not provide anything back. So most sites try to protect their content, and this can lead to scrapping.

This is also a topic in the EU where the directive on the protection of copyright and related rights is currently under revision.

What is bot scraping?

In brief, it is the process of using a bot to automatically access your website and scrape any data it can from the site, as well as any information that could be found in the HTML source. The most obvious reason for this is to see if there are any vulnerabilities on the website that you are visiting. For example, a bot may run through the source of a website to check if there are any forms that allow a user to add another entry to a database or to upload files that contain viruses. Why use a bot? The use of bots is growing rapidly and is becoming more common as more people are becoming aware of the benefits of using them. However, in order for a bot to work, it needs to know what information it can find on a website. Fortunately, you can teach a bot to do this for you by using a code called an Automated Trawling Script (ATS). This is a script that will search a website and tell the bot which elements it can access. For example, a web form on your site may be found at the following URL: You can have a script that tells the bot to look for a form that contains a certain word. For example, if you wanted to find any form on a website that contained the word "Contact Us" you could have a script that would look like this: As a result, the bot would be able to find any forms on the website that contain the word "Contact Us" and you would not need to manually search the website. To do this, you would simply add the relevant code to the top of your script. For example, if you wanted to use a Perl ATS, you would write your code as follows: This would find any web pages containing the word "Contact Us" in the text, and would then tell the bot to find any input fields in those pages. Once the bot had found the input field, it would run through all the text and extract any names that it thought looked like a person's name. The bot would then look at the person's name and see if it was listed in a contact database or an address book.

Is scraping unethical?

If you've got a blog, you've got to have content. You can't just rely on search engine rankings and traffic. If you've been using Google Webmaster Tools to find out what your competitors are doing, you know that you need to create more content, and you also know that the best way to create content is through links.

If you are writing content in order to create links, you are doing the right thing. It is hard to create high quality content without links, and links are worth a lot of money. In the days when there was only a few hundred dollars to be made from a single link, the value of links was pretty clear. But today, when Google is the gatekeeper to so much of the web, links have become a valuable currency.

The problem with this is that the value of links is changing. It used to be that if you created content and linked to it, that was enough. Now, you need to go further. You need to create linkable content. The kind of content that Google is already beginning to index. The kind of content that is not just search engine friendly, but is search engine optimized.

Scrape content - Is it unethical? There are times when it is acceptable to use other people's content without their permission. But when you are scraping content, you are not only stealing someone's work, you are stealing their audience.

If you are a blogger, or someone who writes regularly for a site, you know that you are constantly being asked to write content for people. And if you are lucky, they will link back to you. But if you are not lucky, you will be stuck with a piece of content that you didn't write, or that no one else wants to read.

Even worse, if you are scraping content, you are making it harder for those sites to be indexed by Google. If you have a blog with lots of content, and if you are scraping other blogs, you are going to get fewer and fewer links. And you are going to see your rankings decline.

If you want to be successful, you need to write good content. You need to write content that other people want to read, and link to. And you need to do it yourself, not steal someone else's work.