We have several sites listing classified listings across various sectors (jobs, cars, homes etc). Our sites are well established in Scotland and many are market leaders.
This obviously attracts scraping sites (such as JobRapido, Simplyhired) which we need to protect ourselves against. Technical attempts to block the scraper sites have failed as they just keep changing IP Addresses. We're going down the legal route, but that could take time. The scraper sites are starting to creep above us in SERPS, not surprising as they have huge volumes of content.
Our development team have proposed a scraper referral system whereby any user who arrives at our site via a scraper is redirected to a static page with a message stating that they have come from a scraper site and why they should use our site rather than a scraper. However, there is some concern that this will adversely affect our SEO. Will Google see this as a valid inbound link and then penalise us for redirecting to a page which doesn't contain the expected content?
Does anyone know of a tried and tested solution which has worked?
Thanks in advance
This obviously attracts scraping sites (such as JobRapido, Simplyhired) which we need to protect ourselves against. Technical attempts to block the scraper sites have failed as they just keep changing IP Addresses. We're going down the legal route, but that could take time. The scraper sites are starting to creep above us in SERPS, not surprising as they have huge volumes of content.
Our development team have proposed a scraper referral system whereby any user who arrives at our site via a scraper is redirected to a static page with a message stating that they have come from a scraper site and why they should use our site rather than a scraper. However, there is some concern that this will adversely affect our SEO. Will Google see this as a valid inbound link and then penalise us for redirecting to a page which doesn't contain the expected content?
Does anyone know of a tried and tested solution which has worked?
Thanks in advance