Can any individual rank his site higher in search engine if he has copied the content from other websites ?
Matt Cutts say 'Most of the times you will be ranked higher with original content for a particular keyword as compared to a webpage that has the same scraped content.' However many times it has been noticed that pages with scraped/copied content rank better than the original counterparts. This mainly depends on the SEO you have done and the authority of your site. However you have a chance of beating the competitor from whom you have copied the content is your page is indexed earlier, e.g. if you have an autoblog and the spiders happen to come to your site earlier than to that of the original one.
Well, I can tell you this because I see it every damn day and it really isn't cool... There is a blog, that copies some of the articles I post to my site, and they are ranked 7 spots higher than me... I really haven't done much research on why and how, but I do know that the articles he gets from me are atleast attributed to me with my author and resource box.
Wow, that sucks. I must say that I do copy and paste some articles to my site from other sites, but I always post a source.
you're approaching the logic wrong when you upload content and your competition uploads the exact same content, Google ranks that particular page or block of content based on 1) domain age 2) authority 3) which site got indexed first, which is dependent on 1) and 2) what you're experiencing: you're putting up original and great content your competition sees it, copies it and uploads it onto his site Google spiders find his site first because he has higher PageRank or authority Google indexes his content first Google finds yours and deems it as less valuable as it is now "duplicate content" Google ranks you lower voila
That saved me from doing some research... Thanks Jason I will pass them shortly... Google will be updating very very soon.