If you are familiar with the Internet at all, just the mention of the word “scraper” can bring about tremors (or elation if you happen to have an evil streak). Personally, I like playing with scraping just to see what I can do from a programming perspective, but the idea of using someone else’s content for personal gain is not something I can always get on board with.

For those of you who do not know what a directory scraper is, I’d say in my most basic terms, a directory scraper is a “search engine” that looks to be returning real search results.  However, behind the scenes they are actually just searching a major search engine, Google for example, and then presenting the results as their own.  Most typically these sites monetize their sites by embedding PPC ads in the displayed page.

I’ve not really seen any major SEO advantage to being listed in these sites. Typically a user has to search to see your results. Since search engine spiders do not submit random search terms to these sites, the odds of getting a backlink from a site like this are slim.

Take for example my SEO business. In the past I’ve played with ranking it for “Richmond SEO firm”. You can search Google for that term and see the rankings. Now look at the results of searching a directory scraper site for Richmond SEO firm.  At the time of this writing the results were identical.

Personally, I use Google for nearly all of my non-work searching.  I would not have even found the site I linked to if not for doing some backlink analysis for a client.

I guess then that my main conclusion is that these types of directory scrapers have marginal SEO value at best for link building. Probably not worth the effort to pursue, but maybe a fun way to test things.

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