Have You Heard Of Website Scraping?

If you are reading this post in its entirety on any website other than Must Hike Must Eat, it was stolen without permission.

Website scraping is when a website uses RSS feed or HTML to scrape or steal data from other websites. It is very common and you can find a ton of information on the internet about how to do it.

Although there may be legit uses for this, one that is not is when someone creates a website basically filled with scraped posts from other blogs without their permission in order to appear they have a real website and then generate money.

I recently learned that at least one website is scraping my blog posts into theirs, pretending that they have permission. My posts are basically copied in full as an adulterated version, including all my images. There is no proper credit given, no links and the text is mine but distorted.  It is so offensive.

I have asked them to stop but they have not.

I am not going to name or link to them to give them any publicity.

I also see they are scraping posts from several other hiking blogs, ones I even follow.

Until they stop or I figure out how to prevent it, I will putting the above notice randomly on my blog posts in hopes to deter them or at least let any readers/advertisers on their site know the posts are stolen.

You can learn more about website scraping at articles like these:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_scraping

https://www.parsehub.com/blog/what-is-web-scraping/