They don't know which one is original, so the site that has more weight will get the ranking. Google doesn't care how you rank and won't help you here, but if someone illegally copied your content you can threaten legal action and get them to remove it.
I think that Google works on time stamping, It is sad to say but Google give authority for first crawled content. But there are other things too which should take into consideration like Wegsites authority, other page's content (unique or copied), Domain authority etc.
I highly doubt that Google doesn't know which one is the original. Timestamps and date of cache, perhaps? In theory, the first website that gets crawled, cached and acknowledged over a certain content would appear to be the original poster, no?
According to the patent description, Google's web crawler consults the duplicate content server to check if a found page is a copy of another document. The algorithm then determines which version is the most important version. Google can use different methods to detect duplicate content. For example, Google might take "content fingerprints" and compare them when a new web page is found. Interestingly, it's not always the page with the highest PageRank that is chosen as the most important URL for the content: "In some embodiments, a canonical page of an equivalence class is not necessarily the document that has the highest score (e.g., the highest page rank or other query-independent metric)." Read more: http://www.free-seo-news.com/newsletter399.htm#ixzz1EfcqcnIo
And this should be really scary for all the people. Read it again. The ALGORITHM determines the most important version. Not the original version.
You took it out of context. It also said, Which means it is only one of the many factors that Google's Algorithm looks at before it decides which is the authoritative and the most important one.
But that would not always be the case, is it? Since most of the original content come from authoritative websites.
Which means the site which has more authority has the rights to use the article. This reflects more less the present state of Google world.
theres no way, so better use some trick when you write content, for example, place your website name/url etc inside the article, talk about yourself your own site
Presumptions can sometimes be difficult to prove. I seldom see highly authoritative websites simply copying content from other websites. And if they do, they would normally put a credit source link to the original poster.
If you insist. Some of the highly authoritative websites simply copying content from other websites are Digg, Zimbio and Topix. I do not question usefulness of these sites, I have seen several cases, when the Zimbio page replaced the page from original site in SERPs. In these cases Zimbio has automatically published the content AFTER the original site had been indexed by Google, and there WAS a link to the original content. I think similar thoughts may be thrown by people watching Ezine and some other article sites.
Well, what do you think? You answered your won question... Google has made some serious changes lately to duplicate content sites. Your best bet would be to rewrite the article and make it unique.
Digg is a social bookmarking website and it's the users who submit content, not Digg themselves. Zimbio does copy content from other website but they don't always rank ahead of the original though. I've had a check on some Lady GaGa article and they were on position 8 when I checked a certain block on content. As for Topix, not entirely sure how this website works. Is this similar to Digg? I've heard that this an open news editing platform slightly similar to what wikipedia does.
None of that is really reliable. Most copied content is stolen and copied almost instantly so it's not even really likely that the original will be cached first in most cases. There's just nothing like that that's reliable enough to do algorithmically, so they just rank them the same as they would any other pages. It's actually really easy to get autoblogs with copied content ranking way above all the sites you're aggregating from, it's just not quite as easy to do while not leaving a paper trail in case of serious legal trouble. There are plenty of people doing it though.
I actually seen 2 copies of same article ranking 1st and 2nd as far as I can remember. So Google does rank copied contents. Although they discourage it all the time.
Plausible. Then again, most people who use autoblogs have been copying content in which I'd guess that they don't have authority over someone's original content? While there are some authoritative sites who use autoblogs, they would seem to be the perfect example to your theory.
maybe the time your article will be saved/published in the database. Maybe they can check it.. not sure though