Getting Value Out of Scrapers

How annoying is it when you make a post and 5 other posts rank above yours in the search engines all that have your content wrapped around huge Adsense units. When you goto the site not only is it copied word for word but there is zero attribution to the source. Fighting this battle is a full time job in itself. I have many friends who will spend all day(s) worrying about a post that stole there content and ranks over them but does not give them credit. They will even sometimes get a lawyer to file a cease and desist and all that even though many times the scrapers are located in countries. So what can you do? I came up with this idea a while back to put a link back to my site in my blog feed. This works because if search engines think a blog is worthy enough to outrank yours then it should pass you juice as the authority of the article. If the site doesnt rank (lets face it 100% of the traffic to these scrapers is search engine generated) then its a wash because the search engine has already identified and the site never had any link juice (page rank) to pass in the first place. I talked to Joost De Valk about the idea and he has made a plugin for it. So of course this brings the question... isn't this gaming the search engines trying to get backlnks? I do not think so but it would be nice to hear a comment from a search engine engineer (you listening Matt ;) ). In my opinion its all about intent. In your link back to your site if you are using the keyword of "buy Viagra" then ... ya. In my case if I am using the keyword of "shoemoney" I think that is fair. UPDATE: Matt Cutts - Googles lead spam engineer has responded in the comments:

Comment by Matt Cutts 2008-01-10 14:41:09 Don’t cloak the link or make the anchortext spammy, but otherwise: sure. See the interview I did with Stephan here: http://www.stephanspencer.com/search-engines/matt-cutts-interview where I said that syndicating articles with a link to the original article was smart:

Thanks Matt!