I've had my entire site cloned by scammers looking for content. I fought back by continuing to publish boring and ill-written posts that no one wants to read. That shut them down after a few months.

I don't know why they bothered. As this article notes, content is cheap. You can always find someone to write empty words for pennies. I can see no easy way for Google to combat this apart from boosting trusted sites.

One way to try to raise your PageRank is to submit your own articles to HackerNews, like whalabi just did. Nothing wrong with that - I've done it myself - but it didn't work for me.