As a result of accidentally blocking Google from crawling my site I saw a lot of other sites appear in the SERPs that had copied my content, illegally, without permission etc. etc.
Now, I had gone to the effort to block IP addresses of websites that copied me (the ones that Pinged me when linking back were the easy ones to spot). But the other day I noticed more blogspot blogs copying my content. I dug a little deeper (and contacted Google, who I think helped resolve the problem – thanks!).
What these cheeky, pesky, thieving auto bloggers do is set uop a blogspot blog, then set it to post by email. Then set up another email address and forward all mail to the blogger email addess for posting. The blogger emails are in this format: blogURL.your-password@blogger.com
Then they subscribe to Feedburner feeds and on receiving the email, designed to entice readers back, they just auto-publish it on their site.
There is nothing you can do to stop this activity, and as any email address can be redirected to a blogger blog, nothing I can see that Google can do to stop it either.
Anyway, there you go. Maybe Google / Blogger need to switch off the email update option. This is a typical example of the type of things the blackhat seo people do. Often they use open source tools to stay off the Google radar for longer, but some are getting a bit bolder.
I am tempted to auto publish my own feed to my own blogspot blog, just so that I reduce the damage done by others copying me. But then I would probably be in breach of Google rules and risk finding myself in an even worse position than I am right now.