Scraper Link

Automatically generated spam links often in enormous numbers, built not necessarily with intention to harm. Easy to spot and disavow (or ignore).

Scraper links are a special category of spam links that appear in huge numbers, but are easy to disavow.

These are links automatically generated by blackhat software on spammy software with the purpose of attracting (little) organic traffic. The intention is often only to get a few percent of their scraper site to rank.

Due to the footprints such scraper websites have, they are easy to spot and disavow.

Most famous example are “TheGlobe” which run a network of scraper websites just republishing the list of websites ordered by Alexa Rank.

Depending on the actual domain, they either offer

• link removal for a fee, which seems to be their main business model since Google Penguin
• paid links purchase, which seems irrelevant if every domain known to mankind is listed on one of their millions of pages automatically created.

Trivial scraper spam links like TheGlobe are sometimes used as an explanation about how easy it is to find toxic links.

That is not correct. In fact those scraper links are usually nothing to worry about and can be disavowed really easy. For example in Link Detox^® disavowing 10000s of such links works with the click of 1 button.

There were reports in the past tough, where scraper links posed a problem for very young websites.