Hi Guys (and Girls), My blog is now being scraped. I get pingbacks from sites showing an excerpt of my article and a link back to my site. I doubt the links are 'follow' because there is no sign in my webmaster tools of incoming links. Will I be punished in any way for this? Sites with irrelevant content scraping me and linking back? Or, is it slightly beneficial? Any thoughts would be appreciated. Thanks.
I would use full URLs on all your posts rather than relative ones to help counter with scraping. This would lead to a link back to your website helping Google to minimise duplicate content issues. Have you tried reporting it to Google? Do you have the URL of the scraper site?
You don't have control over other websites who are adding your link to them or scraping content. Don't worry on those sites. But you have control to whom you are linking to. Don't link to bad neighbors.
Don't get alarmed by those kind of pingbacks. Indeed there are still beneficial because they give at least traffic from your sites even if its no-follow.