If you write for the web, whether that be on a blog or any other content site, there is a good chance your content has been scraped at some point, if not on a continuous basis. The good news is that it's probably not that big of a deal. At least that is what Google's Matt Cutts imples.

Answering user questions as he so often does, Cutts took on the question, "Is there a way to benefit from content scraped from your site?"

The simple answer to this is yes. You actually may be able to slightly benefit from having your content scraped. According to Cutts, if you make sure the pages on your site have links to you in them, the scrapers may leave the links in and end up linking to you. He says these links can "help you along."

"There are some people who really hate scrapers and try to crack down on them and try to get every single one deleted or kicked off their web host," says Cutts. "I tend to be the sort of person who doesn't really worry about it, because the vast, vast, vast majority of the time, it's going to be you that comes up, not the scraper. If the guy is scraping and scrapes the content that has a link to you, he's linking to you, so worst case, it won't hurt, but in some weird cases, it might actually help a little bit."

It's the same principle that Cutts talked about when talking about having links in low-quality directories. He says Google tries not to score the low-quality directories too high, but it doesn't hurt your site at all for being listed there.

He says that most of the time, you don't really need to worry about scrapers, because they don’t have a large effect in terms of the actual impact on users very often. He does add that if you see a scraper ranking higher than you, you can consider doing a Digital Millennium Copyright Act request (DMCA), or if it's a true spammer (gibberish, etc.) you can go ahead and do a spam report on them.