Remixing or Scraping

So I’ve been reading a bit about content scraping and content remixing over the past few days. From Searchviews.com:

What makes seo spammerscontent remix artists so infuriating is how hard they are to catch. Filters, patches, and blocks can barely keep up with the daily assault. These marketers keep finding more and more ways to alter the content so that engines find it undetectable. I guess that’s creativity, in its own sick way.

Content Spamming as Content Remixing

Barry’s talking about it on SearchEngineRoundtable

Remixing is an art according to all musicians that do it. To automate an art is oxymoronic. A bot can be programmed to perform certain tasks and repeat. That by definition is not art. So in my humble opinion, “content remixing” is not the same thing as scrapping content from a page in an automated fashion.

Content Remixing = Content Scraping

Jason Dowdell has this to say:

Compare Technorati’s Live 8 page to the many scraper sites. They both generate content dynamically, they both display advertisements, and they both were created to rank well in search engines.

So what’s the difference?

Scraper sites do not create anything for the public - no new value is brought to life through the scraper’s efforts. Content remixers use other people’s works to create a new experience. Scrapers recycle experiences.

Content Remix Artists Shout Out

While I think “providing a new experience” argument is a little thin, the Technorati case is an interesting one. I use technorati for searches and feel that they do provide services which are valuable. However doing a search for something like “search engine optimization” leads to sinterestingting questions:asideside faestheticstics what makes that page different than any other scraper page?
How is a page like that providing an added value, service or experience?
Does aggregating news/information snippets from other sources provide a value or service?
Where is the line between scraping and remixing, is it thin and narrow or broad and fuzzy?
What’s justifiable/acceptable reuse as far as search engines are concerned?
How likely is this to cause duplicate content penalties?

tags: (search engine optimization | seo | sem | search engine marketing | blogs | blogging | spam | remixing )

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