I recently built a scraper site as an experiment and learned a lot.

It was built on some free hosting and after three weeks was stopped by the host due to infringing the TOS. Dunno why!

I had it linked to three fairly busy photography forums and was getting the whole first post in a thread including the photos.

I soon had a thousand blog posts up, with no extra work.

I was outranking the forums for their posts.

I soon came from page 3 to #9 for my main keywords.

My blog posts linked to the original.

I submitted the blog to MBL and did a Feedburner feed. Also got a link from one directory.

With the scraper software you can set it to visit the RSS feed at predetermined intervals. They recommend minimum of one hour intervals but one of the forums had it set to 15 minutes so that's what the software did for that forum.

With my scraper site being so busy, Google was living on my doorstep, craving for more fresh content, so the forums had little chance of being indexed before me, for their own content.

So, possibly the biggest lesson is that you've gotta get indexed fast: faster than the scraper sites. This is achieved by frequently updating, having plenty of ping services in your ping list (a hundred) and links from active sites such as Feedburner, MBL, Blogcatalog, Technorati and as many more as you can find. Also create a FB page for your blog and link the blog to that page. A twitter account wouldn't go astray either.

Think I'm a dirty, rotten scoundrel, do ya? Well, I really don't care what others think. I now know what I'm up against with scraper sites getting onto my RSS feed.

Same goes for writing articles for EzineArticles and others. The scraper sites are latched onto the article site categorie's RSS feeds, reproducing only the teaser with no backlink to you, just a link to the whole, original article on the article distributor site. Anyone who reproduces your article with your backlink, in the proper way, will likely be outranked by the scraper sites.

Best wishes for the up hill battle!