Just weeks after Barbados Butterfly reported that her content was being stolen and republished without her permission in her post "[1] I do not want green eggs and ham", I come to find out that The same thing has happened to me. An "Aquatic Cabinets" company has [2] syndicated posts (Don't worry folks - the one place on my site where the link includes rel="nofollow") from my Scuba Diving category onto their site. I have no problem with people syndicating my feeds (that's why they are there), but I have established rules as to how the feeds can be used, and those rules need to be followed. The [3] license under which the content on this site is released specifies that it may not be used for commercial purposes. I have reiterated that in the [4] disclaimer for those not able to comprehend the extremely simplistic license. Links to both are on the bottom of every single page, making them pretty hard to miss, if one were to adhere to common courtesy at all. BRI Aquatic Cabinets is obviously using the feed in a commercial manner. They have also syndicated every single post from the largest scuba-related internet message board onto their site. What's the purpose of all this? Fool search engines into thinking that the site is more important than it really is, thus raising the site's rank in the search engine's results (which theoretically brings in more customers to the site –> commercial.)
I have emailed the admin of the site to remove my feed, but so far no response. No worries though, I have blocked the web server the site is hosted on, so theoretically it won't be able to get any more posts, just constant 403: Forbidden errors.