In my case, the scrapers aren’t doing a very good job. They seem to do it to get content to feed the search engines, probably to drive traffic at adsense or other affiliate programs. Luckily, the ones that grab my feed tend to ‘make’ thousands of posts a month, so they don’t wind up being crawled in the first place. I know other people who’ve fared much worse, though, so I seem to be lucky.

In the opening of every post – at least before you break it with the ‘more’ function – put a fully qualified link ( ie one starting with http:// ) back to your blog. Assuming the scraper doesn’t remove this, it (1) gives you a low quality link, which may help with traffic, and (2) alerts Google to the original source of the content.

http://www.grc.com/dos/grcdos.htm

It’s about “zombies” – everyday computers that have been compromised in some way and run simple, hidden programs in the background, which connect to a central communications service (like IRC) and wait for the signal from an Operator to attack another computer.

I’m convinced that many of the comment/form spam we see today is based on somewhat the same premise; zombie computers with simple programming seek out forms to plant links into. This kind of bot-like link planting has already happened with FOAFr and continues to infrequently happen on another site I’ve worked on.

It’s annoying to me as well, but I find it fascinating and wonder if there’s a clever way to disrupt this network of zombie spam bots, if in fact that is how it’s run.