The Minority Report

Martin over at gHacks posted this lucent and well thought out post about content copying…or…scraping as it’s called in the biz. I suggest you read the whole thing if you are interested in free back links because the “blackhatters” and I use that term very loosely here, can actually help your SERP position if you use them correctly.

One thing I might add is that you should have established yourself with Google as an authority before these techniques work. Make sure that Google is spidering your site on a regular basis. Sometimes, if they have a higher rating/ranking/pagerank/whatever, they will actually get a higher SERP position than YOU with YOUR content!! However, most content scraping sites are caught by Google and have no PageRank so you are usually ok. Plus typically speed is on your side.

Regardless, it’s a great article and I recommend you check it out.

Every webmaster operating a blog will sooner or later notice that there are some websites out there that do nothing else but to copy contents of other websites and post them on their on. This is usually an automated process done with the use of a script and RSS news feeds. The script will check the feeds periodically and post a new article on the website as soon as the original author has published a new one.

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This means that every link that you post in the original article will be posted by them as well if they have automated the process. That means free inbound links to your website. It gets better. If they do link back to your site as they should they usually use the title of the article to do so. This means free targeted inbound links to the article on your website.
Using Content Copying Websites To Your Advantage