Scrapers Abandoning My Site?

In a rather unusual turn of events it appears my bot blocking efforts have went way better than expected to the point they might be backfiring. It appears that not only have some of the more serious scrapers stopped including my content in their sites, as they're being burned in the search engines (thanks guys) and new appearances of directly stolen content has went down drastically.

However, what I'm noticing is a new trend in sites that used to scrape my server now appear to be just scraping snippets off of other websites which I mentioned recently. Where this became most apparent was when I recently launched a boatload of new pages that had some breadcrumbs cloaked into all the pages not being served to the search engines. After a few weeks after releasing the new pages I went searching for references to these pages in Google, Yahoo, etc. and sure enough found some but they didn't contain my bread crumbs.

Doing a bit of quick investigation showed that the snippets indexed in Yahoo and Google actually came from the search engines themselves. This means that my site is being bypassed completely and the search engines are now the target for what little content the scrapers can get to use from my site.

Remember, I installed NOARCHIVE, NOCACHE and did a bunch of other things to minimize my exposure to the scrapers via the search engines many months ago yet they're still scrambling for the last few scraps that can get.

Just goes to show you how desperate these assholes are for any little scrap of information that ranks high.

Kind of sad that the search engines can't tell they're eating their own dog food though...