Extractions and Skin Care

As an esthetician or skin care professional, you may have heard some controversy over the matter of performing extractions during a routine facial service. What may seem like a relatively simple procedure can actually raise great controversy in the world of esthetics. Some estheticians regard extractions as a matter of providing a complete service while others see this as inflicting trauma to the skin. Learning more about both sides of the issue can help you as a professional in making an informed decision and explaining the issue to your clients.

What is an extraction?

As a basic review, an extraction is removing impurity (plug of dead skin or oil) from a pore or pimple. It is the removal of both blackheads and whiteheads from the skin. Extractions occur after the skin has been thoroughly cleansed, exfoliated and sometimes steamed to soften the area prior to extraction.

Why Do It?
Extractions are considered a "must" by many estheticians when performing a routine facial because they want to leave their clients skin looking and feeling it's best. When done correctly, a simple extraction should be quick and relatively painless. As a trained esthetician it is important to know if your client has sensitive skin which would make them more prone to the damage that can be caused by extractions.

Why Not?

Extractions should only be performed by a trained esthetician and should not be done in excess. Extractions can cause broken capillaries or sin irritations that can lead to more (not less) breakouts. Extractions can also cause discomfort for your client when done incorrectly so you should seek their permission before performing any type of extraction during their facial. Remember your client has the right to know any product or procedure being performed on their skin and make an informed choice.

Who Decides?

As an esthetician it may be entirely up to you or it may be a procedure within your salon to do or not do extractions. It is important to check the guidelines of your employer and know their policies before performing any procedure. Remember to explain extractions and their benefits and possible complications to your client. Trust is an important part of any relationship and your client needs to know you are being open and honest with them. The last thing you want as a professional is a reputation for inflicting unnecessary and unwanted procedures or damage to your client's skin.

Bellanina Institute's owner and director, Nina Howard, is a multi-talented, forward-thinking entrepreneur who has built the Bellanina brand form the ground up to a successful million-dollar spa, spa training business, and skin care product line. Nina is a Licensed Esthetician with Para-Medical studies, Massage Therapist, Polarity Therapist, Skin Care Educator, Artist, and Professional Interior Designer.

Source:http://ezinearticles.com/?Extractions-and-Skin-Care&id=5271715

RAM Scraping a New Old Favorite For Hackers

Some of the best stories involve a conflict with an old enemy: a friend-turned-foe, long thought dead, returning from the grave for violent retribution; an ancient order of dark siders from the distant reaches of the galaxy, hiding in plain sight and waiting to seize power for themselves; a dark lord thought destroyed millennia ago, only to rise again and seek his favorite piece of jewelry.  The list goes on.

Granted, 2011 isn’t quite “millennia,” and this story isn’t meant for entertainment, but the old foe in this instance is nonetheless dangerous in its own right.  That is the year when RAM scraping malware first made major headlines: originating as an advanced version of the Trackr malware, controlled through a botnet, it was discovered in the compromised Point of Sale (POS) systems of a university and several hotels.  And while it seemed recently that this method had dwindled in popularity, the Target and other retail breaches saw it return with a vengeance.  With 110 million Target customers having their information compromised, it was easily one the largest incidents involving memory scrapers.

How does it work?  First, the malware has to be introduced into the POS network, which can happen via any machine that is connected to the network, or unsecured wireless networks.  Even with firewalls, an infected laptop could serve as a vector.  Once installed, the malware can hide in the shadows, employing encryption or antivirus-avoiding tools to prevent its identification until it’s ready to strike.  Then, when a customer’s card gets used at a POS machine, the data contained within—name, card number, security code, etc.—gets sent to the system memory.  “There is that opportunity to steal the credit card information when it is in memory, perhaps even before your payment has even been authorized, and the data hasn't even been written to the hard drive yet,” says security researcher Graham Cluley.

So, why not encrypt the system’s memory, when it’s at its most vulnerable?  Not that simple, sadly: “No matter how strong your encryption is, if the system needs to process data or process the code, everything needs to be decrypted in memory,” Chris Elisan, principal malware scientist at security firm RSA, explained to Dark Reading.

There are certain steps a company can take, of course, and should take, to reduce the risk.  Strong passwords to access the POS machines, firewalls to isolate the POS network from the Internet, disabling remote access to POS systems, to name a few.  All the same, while these measures are vital and should be used, I don’t think, in light of recent breaches, they are sufficient.  Now, I wrote a short time ago about the impending October 2014 deadline imposed by the credit card industry, regarding the systematic switch to chipped credit card technology; adopting this standard will definitely assist in eradicating this problem.  But, until such a time when a widespread implementation of new systems comes about, always be vigilant to protect your data from attack, because what’s old is new again, and a colossal data breach is a story consumers are liable to seek financial restitution for.

Source:http://www.netlib.com/blog/application-security/RAM-Scraping-a-New-Old-Favorite-For-Hackers.asp

Microfinance Data Scraping

I went to the Datakind‘s New York Datadive last November and met the Microfinance Information Exchange (MIX), a group that ‘delivers data services, analysis, research and business information on the institutions that provide financial services to the world’s poor’. They wanted to see whether web-scraping could save them from manually gathering data. So fellow divers and I showed MIX the utility of web-scraping. Over the course of a day, about six people scraped data about microfinance institutions from a bunch of websites, saving MIX an estimated year of manual data entry.

Over the past few months, I worked further with MIX to study who has access to what sorts of financial services. DataKind just put up our blog post about the project. Read the post, or just look at the map and explore the data.

Source:https://blog.scraperwiki.com/2012/05/microfinance-data-scraping/

Content Scraping Reuses Blog Posts without Permission

What do popular blogs and websites such as Social Media Examiner, Copy Blogger, CNN.com, Mashable, and Type A Parent have in common? No, it’s not traffic and a loyal online community, each was a victim of the content scraping site “BuzzMyFx.” Although most bloggers fall victim to content scrapers at least once, the offending website was such an extreme case the backlash against it was fast and furious. Thanks to the quick action of many angry bloggers, BuzzMyFix was taken down in a matter of days.

If you’re not familiar with content scraping sites and aren’t sure why they’re bad and what you can do if you fall prey, read on. Not knowing what steps you can take to remove your content from a scraping site can mean someone else is profiting from your hard work.

What is content scraping?

Content scraping is when a blog or website pulls in other bloggers’ content without permission, in many cases passing it off as their own. Instead of stocking their sites with unique content, they steal entire blog posts. Some do leave the original authors’ bylines, but there are plenty that don’t provide attribution at all. This is not a good thing at all.

If you don’t care about someone taking your content and putting it on their blogs and websites without your permission, you should. These sites are stealing traffic, search engine rankings, and even advertising revenue from bloggers. Moreover, by ignoring scraping sites you’re giving the message that this practice is OK.

It’s not OK.

How was BuzzMyFx different?

BuzzMyFx was a little different from your usual scrapers. Bloggers didn’t just find their content had been posted on this site, they learned their entire blogs — down to the design and comments — had been cloned. Plus, any bloggers checking to see if their blogs were being cloned immediately found themselves being scraped as well. Dozens, if not hundreds of blogs were affected. However, bloggers didn’t take this incident sitting down. They spread the word and contacted the site’s host en masse. Thanks to their swift action, and the high number of complaints, the site was removed quickly.

How can I tell if my content is being scraped?

Fortunately for content creators, scrapers are a lazy bunch. Because their sites are automated, and they don’t check or read the content being pulled, they don’t take many precautions to ensure the people they scrape from don’t find their sites. In fact, they may not even care. Fortunately, this makes it easy to learn if your content is being stolen.

    Link to your own articles — When you write a blog post and link to other (of your own) blog posts within that post, it’s not only good SEO. You also will get pingbacks whenever someone else steals your content because of your interlinks. You’re alerted when someone links to your content, and when content is published with your links, you’ll get that alert.

    Google Alerts — If your name, blog’s name, or other unique keywords are set up as Google Alerts, you’ll receive an e-mail every time content is published with these keywords.

    Analytics — When people click on your links that are in scraped content, it will show up as referring traffic in your analytics program. You should always check referring traffic so you can thank the referring site owner, but also to make sure no one is stealing your content.

What steps can I take to remove my content from a scraper?
If you find your content is being stolen, know you have several options. First, you’ll need to find out who owns the scraping site. You can find this out by doing a WHOis domain lookup, which will enable you to search for the website’s details, including the name of the webmaster, contact info, and the name of the site’s host.

Keep in mind that sometimes the website’s owner will pay extra to have his or her name kept private, but you will always be able to find the name of the host. Once you have this information, you can take the necessary steps to have your content removed.

    Contact the site’s owner personally: Your first step should always be a polite request to remove your content immediately. Let the website owner know he or she is in violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), and you will take the necessary steps to report him if he doesn’t comply.

    Contact the site’s host: If you can’t find the name of the person who owns the site, or if he won’t comply with your takedown request, contact the website’s host. You’ll have to prove your content is being stolen. As the host can be held liable for allowing the content theft, it’s in their best interest to contact the website owner and request removal.

    Contact Google: You can contact Google and fill out a form to have them remove the website from their search engines.

    Spread the word: Let all your blogging friends know about content scrapers when you come across them. The more people who take action against content scrapers, the less likely they are to do it again.

Contacting the webmaster with a takedown notice doesn’t have to be an intimidating process, either. The website Plagiarism Today has a wonderful set of stock letters to use to contact webmasters, web hosts, and even Google. All you have to do is insert the necessary information.

Content scrapers and cloners may try to steal your content, but you don’t have to let them. Stand up for what’s yours.

Source: http://www.dummies.com/how-to/content/content-scraping-reuses-blog-posts-without-permiss.html

Finding & Removing Spam Blogs Who Scrape Content Onto Free Hosted Blogs

The more popular you become in the blogging world, the more crap you have to deal with!
Content scraping is one chore that can be dealt with swiftly once you understand what to do.
This post contains links which you can use to quickly and easily report content scrapers and spam blogs.
Please share this post and help clean up spam blogs and punish content scrapers.
First step is to find your url’s which have been scraped of content and then get the scrapers spam blog removed.

Some of the tools i use to do this are:

    Google Webmaster Tools
    Google Alerts

Finding Scraped Content
Login to your Google Webmaster Tools account and go to traffic > links to your site.
You should see something like this:
Webmaster Tools Links to Your Site

The first domain is a site which has copied and embedded my homepage which i have already dealt with.
The second site is a search engine.
The third domain is the one i want to deal with.

A common method scrapers use is to post the scraped content from your rss feed on to a free hosted blog like WordPress.com or blogger.com.

Once you click the WordPress.com link in webmaster tools, you’ll find all the url’s which have been scraped.
Links to Your Site

There’s 32 url’s which have been linked to so its simply a matter of clicking each of your links and finding the culprits.

The first link is my homepage which has been linked to by legit domains like WordPress developers.
The others are mainly linked to by spam blogs who have scraped the content and used a free hosted service which in this case is WordPress.com.
WordPress.com Links to Your Site
 Reporting & Removing Spam Blogs

Once you have the url’s of the content scraping blogs as seen in the screenshot above:

    Fill in this basic form to report spam to WordPress.com
    Fill in this form to report copyright content to WordPress.com
    Use this form to report Blogspot and Blogger.com content which has been scraped.
    Fill in one of these forms to remove content from Google

Google Alerts

Its very easy to setup a Google alert to find your post titles when they get scraped.
If you’ve setup the WordPress SEO plugin correctly, you should have included your site title at the end of all your post titles.
Then all you need to do is setup a Google alert for your site title and you’ll be notified every time a scraper links to your content.

Link Notifications

You may also receive a pingback or trackback if you have this feature enabled in your discussion settings.

Link Notifications
RSS Feed Links
Most content scrapers use automated software to scrape the content from RSS feeds.
Make sure you configure your Reading settings so only a summary is displayed.
Reading Settings Feed Summary

Next step is to configure the settings in Yoast’s SEO plugin so links back to your site are included in all RSS feed post summaries.

RSS Feed Links
This will help search engines identify you and your domain as the original author of the content.
There’s other services like copyscape and dmca which can help you protect your sites content if you’re prepared to pay a premium.
That’s it folks.
Its easy to find and get spam sites removed once you know what to do.
Hope you don’t have to deal with this garbage to often.
Ever found out your content has been scraped?
What did you do about it?

Source: http://wpsites.net/blogging/content-scraping-monitoring-and-prevention-tips/

What you have to know before requesting web scraping services?

Before you request web scraping services you have to know what are your needs (what data you need, structure of it and where you can find this data).

Step 1: Define what data you need?
Data needs depending on purpose, if you want to find new customers you probably need contact data from players in your industry. Also if you want to study your competitors you need to define who are they. Only after that you can select data sources (websites feeds or other electronic sources) for this extraction.

In many cases for discovering and defining data sources are used search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo, and others.

Step 2: Structure of data

Data structure it’s directly linked to usage purpose. In many cases data structure it’s a table where a row represents an entity and a cell of this row represents a property of this entity. In other cases Data structure is a a chart or another graphic representation builder with data extracted from a web source.

Step 3: Number of data extraction

In many cases is needed one time data extraction. In other cases when you need a regular report, are needed periodically extractions.

If you have defined all of above points you are ready to request a quote and an amount estimation from this contact form.

Source: http://thewebminer.com/blog/2013/08/

A Content Marketer's Guide to Data Scraping

As digital marketers, big data should be what we use to inform a lot of the decisions we make. Using intelligence to understand what works within your industry is absolutely crucial within content campaigns, but it blows my mind to know that so many businesses aren't focusing on it.

One reason I often hear from businesses is that they don't have the budget to invest in complex and expensive tools that can feed in reams of data to them. That said, you don't always need to invest in expensive tools to gather valuable intelligence — this is where data scraping comes in.

Just so you understand, here's a very brief overview of what data scraping is from Wikipedia:

    "Data scraping is a technique in which a computer program extracts data from human-readable output coming from another program."

Essentially, it involves crawling through a web page and gathering nuggets of information that you can use for your analysis. For example, you could search through a site like Search Engine Land and scrape the author names of each of the posts that have been published, and then you could correlate this to social share data to find who the top performing authors are on that website.

Hopefully, you can start to see how this data can be valuable. What's more, it doesn't require any coding knowledge — if you're able to follow my simple instructions, you can start gathering information that will inform your content campaigns. I've recently used this research to help me get a post published on the front page of BuzzFeed, getting viewed over 100,000 times and channeling a huge amount of traffic through to my blog.

Disclaimer: One thing that I really need to stress before you read on is the fact that scraping a website may breach its terms of service. You should ensure that this isn't the case before carrying out any scraping activities. For example, Twitter completely prohibits the scraping of information on their site. This is from their Terms of Service:

    "crawling the Services is permissible if done in accordance with the provisions of the robots.txt file, however, scraping the Services without the prior consent of Twitter is expressly prohibited"

Google similarly forbids the scraping of content from their web properties:

    Google's Terms of Service do not allow the sending of automated queries of any sort to our system without express permission in advance from Google.

So be careful, kids.
Content analysis

Mastering the basics of data scraping will open up a whole new world of possibilities for content analysis. I'd advise any content marketer (or at least a member of their team) to get clued up on this.

Before I get started on the specific examples, you'll need to ensure that you have Microsoft Excel on your computer (everyone should have Excel!) and also the SEO Tools plugin for Excel (free download here). I put together a full tutorial on using the SEO tools plugin that you may also be interested in.

Alongside this, you'll want a web crawling tool like Screaming Frog's SEO Spider or Xenu Link Sleuth (both have free options). Once you've got these set up, you'll be able to do everything that I outline below.

So here are some ways in which you can use scraping to analyse content and how this can be applied into your content marketing campaigns:

1. Finding the different authors of a blog

Analysing big publications and blogs to find who the influential authors are can give you some really valuable data. Once you have a list of all the authors on a blog, you can find out which of those have created content that has performed well on social media, had a lot of engagement within the comments and also gather extra stats around their social following, etc.

I use this information on a daily basis to build relationships with influential writers and get my content placed on top tier websites. Here's how you can do it:

Step 1: Gather a list of the URLs from the domain you're analysing using Screaming Frog's SEO Spider. Simply add the root domain into Screaming Frog's interface and hit start (if you haven't used this tool before, you can check out my tutorial here).

Once the tool has finished gathering all the URLs (this can take a little while for big websites), simply export them all to an Excel spreadsheet.

Step 2: Open up Google Chrome and navigate to one of the article pages of the domain you're analysing and find where they mention the author's name (this is usually within an author bio section or underneath the post title). Once you've found this, right-click their name and select inspect element (this will bring up the Chrome developer console).

Within the developer console, the line of code associated to the author's name that you selected will be highlighted (see the below image). All you need to do now is right-click on the highlighted line of code and press Copy XPath.

For the Search Engine Land website, the following code would be copied:

//*[@id="leftCol"]/div[2]/p/span/a

This may not make any sense to you at this stage, but bear with me and you'll see how it works.

Step 3: Go back to your spreadsheet of URLs and get rid of all the extra information that Screaming Frog gives you, leaving just the list of raw URLs – add these to the first column (column A) of your worksheet.

Step 4: In cell B2, add the following formula:

=XPathOnUrl(A2,"//*[@id='leftCol']/div[2]/p/span/a")

Just to break this formula down for you, the function XPathOnUrl allows you to use the XPath code directly within (this is with the SEO Tools plugin installed; it won't work without this). The first element of the function specifies which URL we are going to scrape. In this instance I've selected cell A2, which contains a URL from the crawl I did within Screaming Frog (alternatively, you could just type the URL, making sure that you wrap it within quotation marks).

Finally, the last part of the function is our XPath code that we gathered. One thing to note is that you have to remove the quotation marks from the code and replace them with apostrophes. In this example, I'm referring to the "leftCol" section, which I've changed to ‘leftCol' — if you don't do this, Excel won't read the formula correctly.

Once you press enter, there may be a couple of seconds delay whilst the SEO Tools plugin crawls the page, then it will return a result. It's worth mentioning that within the example I've given above, we're looking for author names on article pages, so if I try to run this on a URL that isn't an article (e.g. the homepage) I will get an error.

For those interested, the XPath code itself works by starting at the top of the code of the URL specified and following the instructions outlined to find on-page elements and return results. So, for the following code:

//*[@id='leftCol']/div[2]/p/span/a

We're telling it to look for any element (//*) that has an id of leftCol (@id='leftCol') and then go down to the second div tag after this (div[2]), followed by a p tag, a span tag and finally, an a tag (/p/span/a). The result returned should be the text within this a tag.

Don't worry if you don't understand this, but if you do, it will help you to create your own XPath. For example, if you wanted to grab the output of an a tag that has rel=author attached to it (another great way of finding page authors), then you could use some XPath that looked a little something like this:

//a[@rel='author']

As a full formula within Excel it would look something like this:

=XPathOnUrl(A2,"//a[@rel='author']")

Once you've created the formula, you can drag it down and apply it to a large number of URLs all at once. This is a huge time-saver as you'd have to manually go through each website and copy/paste each author to get the same results without scraping – I don't need to explain how long this would take.

Now that I've explained the basics, I'll show you some other ways in which scraping can be used…

2. Finding extra details around page authors

So, we've found a list of author names, which is great, but to really get some more insight into the authors we will need more data. Again, this can often be scraped from the website you're analysing.

Most blogs/publications that list the names of the article author will actually have individual author pages. Again, using Search Engine Land as an example, if you click my name at the top of this post you will be taken to a page that has more details on me, including my Twitter profile, Google+ profile and LinkedIn profile. This is the kind of data that I'd want to gather because it gives me a point of contact for the author I'm looking to get in touch with.

Here's how you can do it.

Step 1: First we need to get the author profile URLs so that we can scrape the extra details off of them. To do this, you can use the same approach to find the author's name, with just a little addition to the formula:

=XPathOnUrl(A2,"//a[@rel='author']", <strong>"href"</strong>)

The addition of the "href" part of the formula will extract the output of the href attribute of the atag. In Lehman terms, it will find the hyperlink attached to the author name and return that URL as a result.

Step 2: Now that we have the author profile page URLs, you can go on and gather the social media profiles. Instead of scraping the article URLs, we'll be using the profile URLs.

So, like last time, we need to find the XPath code to gather the Twitter, Google+ and LinkedIn links. To do this, open up Google Chrome and navigate to one of the author profile pages, right-click on the Twitter link and select Inspect Element.

Once you've done this, hover over the highlighted line of code within Chrome's developer tools, right-click and select Copy XPath.

Step 3: Finally, open up your Excel spreadsheet and add in the following formula (using the XPath that you've copied over):

=XPathOnUrl(C2,"//*[@id='leftCol']/div[2]/p/a[2]", "href")

Remember that this is the code for scraping Search Engine Land, so if you're doing this on a different website, it will almost certainly be different. One important thing to highlight here is that I've selected cell C2 here, which contains the URL of the author profile page and not just the article page. As well as this, you'll notice that I've included "href" at the end because we want the actual Twitter profile URL and not just the words ‘Twitter'.

You can now repeat this same process to get the Google+ and LinkedIn profile URLs and add it to your spreadsheet. Hopefully you're starting to see the value in this, and how it can be used to gather a lot of intelligence that can be used for all kinds of online activity, not least your SEO and social media campaigns.

3. Gathering the follower counts across social networks

Now that we have the author's social media accounts, it makes sense to get their follower counts so that they can be ranked based on influence within the spreadsheet.

Here are the final XPath formulae that you can plug straight into Excel for each network to get their follower counts. All you'll need to do is replace the text INSERT SOCIAL PROFILE URL with the cell reference to the Google+/LinkedIn URL:

Google+:

=XPathOnUrl(<strong>INSERTGOOGLEPROFILEURL</strong>,"//span[@class='BOfSxb']")

LinkedIn:

=XPathOnUrl(<strong>INSERTLINKEDINURL</strong>,"//dd[@class='overview-connections']/p/strong")

4. Scraping page titles

Once you've got a list of URLs, you're going to want to get an idea of what the content is actually about. Using this quick bit of XPath against any URL will display the title of the page:

=XPathOnUrl(A2,"//title")

To be fair, if you're using the SEO Tools plugin for Excel then you can just use the built-in feature to scrape page titles, but it's always handy to know how to do it manually!

A nice extra touch for analysis is to look at the number of words used within the page titles. To do this, use the following formula:

=CountWords(A2)

From this you can get an understanding of what the optimum title length of a post within a website is. This is really handy if you're pitching an article to a specific publication. If you make the post the best possible fit for the site and back up your decisions with historical data, you stand a much better chance of success.

Taking this a step further, you can gather the social shares for each URL using the following functions:

Twitter:

=TwitterCount(<strong>INSERTURLHERE</strong>)

Facebook:

=FacebookLikes(<strong>INSERTURLHERE</strong>)

Google+:

=GooglePlusCount(<strong>INSERTURLHERE</strong>)

Note: You can also use a tool like URL Profiler to pull in this data, which is much better for large data sets. The tool also helps you to gather large chunks of data from other social networks, link data sources like Ahrefs, Majestic SEO and Moz, which is awesome.

If you want to get even more social stats then you can use the SharedCount API, and this is how you go about doing it…

Firstly, create a new column in your Excel spreadsheet and add the following formula (where A2 is the URL of the webpage you want to gather social stats for):

=CONCATENATE("http://api.sharedcount.com/?url=",A2)

You should now have a cell that contains your webpage URL prefixed with the SharedCount API URL. This is what we will use to gather social stats. Now here's the Excel formula to use for each network (where B2 is the cell that contaiins the formula above):

StumbleUpon:

=JsonPathOnUrl(B2,"StumbleUpon")

Reddit:

=JsonPathOnUrl(B2,"Reddit")

Delicious:

=JsonPathOnUrl(B2,"Delicious")

Digg:

=JsonPathOnUrl(B2,"Diggs")

Pinterest:

=JsonPathOnUrl(B2,"Pinterest")

LinkedIn:

=JsonPathOnUrl(B2,"Linkedin")

Facebook Shares:

=JsonPathOnUrl(B2,"Facebook.share_count")

Facebook Comments:

=JsonPathOnUrl(B2,"Facebook.comment_count")

Once you have this data, you can start looking much deeper into the elements of a successful post. Here's an example of a chart that I created around a large sample of articles that I analysed within Upworthy.com.

The chart looks at the average number of social shares that an article on Upworthy receives vs the number of words within its title. This is invaluable data that can be used across a whole host of different on-page elements to get the perfect article template for the site you're pitching to.

See, big data is useful!

5. Date/time the post was published

Along with analysing the details of headlines that are working within a site, you may want to look at the optimal posting times for best results. This is something that I regularly do within my blogs to ensure that I'm getting the best possible return from the time I spend writing.

Every site is different, which makes it very difficult for an automated, one-size-fits-all tool to gather this information. Some sites will have this data within the <head> section of their webpages, but others will display it directly under the article headline. Again, Search Engine Land is a perfect example of a website doing this…

So here's how you can scrape this information from the articles on Search Engine Land:

=XPathOnUrl(<strong>INSERTARTICLEURL</strong>,"//*[@class='dateline']/text()")

Now you've got the date and time of the post. You may want to trim this down and reformat it for your data analysis, but you've got it all in Excel so that should be pretty easy.

Extra reading

Data scraping is seriously powerful, and once you've had a bit of a play around with it you'll also realise that it's not that complicated. The examples that I've given are just a starting point but once you get your creative head on, you'll soon start to see the opportunities that arise from this intelligence.

Here's some extra reading that you might find useful:

    http://findmyblogway.com/scraping-communities-with-xpath/

    http://builtvisible.com/data-entry-is-a-waste-of-time/

    http://www.seotakeaways.com/data-scraping-guide-for-seo/

    http://okdork.com/2014/04/30/the-step-by-step-guide-to-10x-growth-for-any-blog/

TL;DR

    Start using actual data to inform your content campaigns instead of going on your gut feeling.

    Gather intelligence around specific domains you want to target for content placement and create the perfect post for their audience.

    Get clued up on XPath and JSON through using the SEO Tools plugin for Excel.

    Spend more time analysing what content will get you results as opposed to what sites will give you links!

    Check the website's ToS before scraping.

Source:http://moz.com/blog/a-content-marketers-guide-to-data-scraping