Anyone who promotes their website and plans to seriously develop their business in the future should know what parsing is. This phenomenon is so widespread that it is impossible to protect yourself from it at 100%. Parsing - is a method of fast information processing, or rather a syntactic analysis of data posted on web pages. It is used to quickly process a large number of texts, numbers, and images.

More about parsing

To put it simply, parsing is the collection of information from other people's websites. Parsing means collecting and analyzing data from different websites using special programs. The essence of this process can be described as follows: a bot visits a website page → parses the HTML code into separate parts → selects the necessary data → stores it in its database. Google's robots are also a kind of parsers, which is why it is so difficult to protect a website from spies, because you can simultaneously restrict access for search engines.

Usually, parsing is only negatively perceived, although it is not illegal. Parsing is about collecting information that is freely available, the program simply allows you to speed up this process. If you use parsing correctly, you can find many advantages in it.

What is parsing for?

Collecting information on the Internet is a painstaking and hard work, so it is almost impossible for a person to systematize it manually. Parsers, on the other hand, can go through a huge amount of resources in one day. What parsing is used for:

• Analysis of pricing policy. To find out the average price of a product, you need to browse hundreds of websites, which is simply unrealistic to do manually.
• Control over changes. If you use parsing regularly, you can easily track competitors' price changes and keep up with new products.
• If you have thousands of products in your store, parsing will help you organize your website, including finding blank pages or other errors.
• Filling out cards in an online store. Manually describing thousands of products is difficult and takes too much time. Parsing will help you do it much faster.
• Building a customer base. This is especially important for owners of spam email campaigns. The parser is sent "on a journey" through social networks, where it collects phone numbers and e-mail addresses.

Parsing is also useful for working with keywords. After making the necessary settings, you can quickly find the right queries.

What parsers are interested in

The law of the Internet is that content is stolen from everyone. Web resource owners love to fill their sites with other people's content, although non-unique information only hurts - positions sink in search and sometimes get banned. Therefore, to protect yourself, you need to know what and how to parsed. 

Not only bots are used for copy-pasting. People also steal successfully with their hands. This mainly concerns texts and images. Texts remain the basis of successful promotion. However, Google always gives preference to the original source, even if the article is completely copied.

How to protect yourself from parsing

Content needs to be protected from the very beginning and not wait until the site becomes famous. This is especially true for young resources, as if they use content from trusted sites, Google may take them as the original source. Ways of protection:

• Prohibition on copying text. This is done with the help of microcode, but it only helps if the text is copied manually. A good specialist can easily bypass this ban. It does not protect against automatic parsing.
• Using reCAPTCHA. This method is also not very effective, as there are many ways to bypass the captcha.
• Paid services. For a fee, the service monitors the content. If a copy is detected, an email is sent to the mail. It is even possible to file a complaint with Google to have it remove the copied text. This method is quite popular in Europe and the USA.
• Blocking bots by IP address. It is effective if information is stolen in large volumes and on a regular basis. But this method has a significant disadvantage - the site may become blocked for search engine crawlers.
• Adding a reference. A script with a link to the original source is added to the text. It is advisable to insert the script inside the text - then there is a higher probability that the link will not be seen and deleted.

It is difficult to fight copycats, but not impossible. You can file a complaint with the search engine support service. At the international level, there is a legal protection of content - the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

What should you do if the texts have not been deleted, but your site has dropped in search results? The most effective way is to try to regain the lost positions. You can try to do it yourself, but the best option is to seek professional help.