Definition

Scraped content is material copied from other websites, frequently through automated tools, and hosted on a site to benefit from search traffic. Google's spam policies treat republishing it without adding original value as a manipulative practice.

Google's policy focuses on intent and added value rather than the act of quoting or referencing other sources. Citing, excerpting, or aggregating with substantial original commentary differs from wholesale copying. The policy targets pages that reproduce others' work, sometimes lightly altered through synonym substitution or minor edits, without contributing analysis, organisation, or material a reader could not already find elsewhere.

Examples

• Verbatim republishing

  A site automatically copies full articles from news publishers and posts them unchanged, surrounding them with advertising.

• Light modification

  A page copies another site's text and substitutes synonyms throughout so the result reads slightly differently but adds no new information.

Sources

• Google Search Central — Spam policies (Scraped content)

Related terms

• Spam Policies
  Google's published rules describing behaviours and techniques that can lower a site's ranking or remove it from search results.
• Duplicate Content
  Substantively identical or very similar content that appears at more than one URL, either within a single site or across different sites.
• Thin Content
  Pages with little or no original value to users — for example, auto-generated text, scraped content, or copied affiliate descriptions.
• Scaled Content Abuse
  Producing many pages at scale primarily to manipulate search rankings rather than to help users.
• Manual Action
  A penalty applied by a Google reviewer when a site is found to violate the search spam policies, demoting or removing affected pages from results.

Where QueryCatch uses this

• SEO Audit
• Competitor Analysis