If you have been in touch with the real estate industry in the last week or so, I'm sure you are aware of the predatory activity of the Metropolitan Indianapolis Board of Realtors (MIBOR) toward their own members, namely Paula Henry http://www.hometoindy.com and her Broker, Mike Taylor http://www.reddoorindy.com.

You can read all the details of this issue at Agent Genius or Real Estate Webmasters, but the short version is that MIBOR has gotten confused as to the difference between the indexing of web pages and the scraping of web content. MIBOR has come to the conclusion that Google is a Scraper site because MLS data from an Agents website IDX was being indexed by Google and other search engines.

Mibor issued a cease and desist letter to the agent and her broker for allowing Google and other search engines to index the detailed information about properties in the MLS via their IDX that are not their own listings.

Since MIBOR seems to be unclear about the difference between Indexing and Scraping, I thought I would illustrate.

I made a posting on the REW forum a couple of weeks ago. The title of the post was "Davis CA Real Estate Prices Hold Up Well 2005 to 2009" It was indexed by Google within a few days. Below you can see the results from Google when I searched for the Title of the Post. It shows up in the #1 spot, right where I posted it, at Real Estste Webmasters.

When you click on the Google result, it takes you right to the page where I posted my original content. You can see the original content by clicking here .

This is called INDEXING !!

But just two results down the page you will see the same title post that is attributed to a URL that is "our-footprint.com/real estate". You can see what my content looks like on this scraper site by clicking here .  (I hate to give this scumbag any link juice, but if it will help clarify things for MIBOR, I'll hold my nose and do it.)

THIS IS A SCRAPER SITE !!

I don't know anything about this site, I didn't write content to be posted on this site. I certainly did not join a "Multiple Listing (type of) Service" with the full knowledge that others would have access to my content (Like MIBOR members do, I presume.)

If you click through and look at the resulting page you will see that the creep that runs this site just "scraped" the information I posted on REW and pasted part of it into his own website/blog on a page with no relevancy, for the sole purpose of having soemthing to advertise around. I can't seem to find a way to read the whole post, just the first paragraph. But there are plenty of ads.

Okay, MIBOR, now that you have seen the difference, repeat after me:  Google is an Indexing Search Engine. On the other hand "our-footprint.com", whoever they are, is a Scraper site. 

There is a difference. 

MIBOR, you're not helping your members, you're hurting them.