I was analyzing one site and come to know that same content and graphic are used on other site of the same person, having four domain with same content but still at top. Site is listed in all the local search engine and superpages, yellowpages, yellow book, yelp, insider pages. I know these are making this site on the top. But how do this site is escaping duplicate content penalty.
its only a duplicate content penalty if you steal someone elses content, i.e. it will penalise the sites that got the content last! the sites taht start with the content mean they have content useful enough to have it stolen, it would be an unfair penalty
I have heard Matt Cutts say this in person several times in the last couple of years. There is no such thing as a "duplicate content penalty". It is a misnomer. When a URL is placed under penalty it means that URL is buried in the the SERPs, many pages back and will NOT show up above a certain point in the SERPs (like above page 4 for what some call a -30 penalty, or above page 7 for what some call a -60 penalty, etc) until you fix whatever you are being penalized for and Google lifts your penalty. Unlike URLs which are being penalized, URLs with duplicate content FREQUENTLY rank on page 1. In the case where multiple URLs render the same content, one URL has its content flagged by Google as the original version and all other URLs have their content flagged as duplicate (probably as some percentage to say the page is, for example, 73% duplicate content). There are over 200 ranking factors that Google is looking at when they rank a page for a particular keyword phrase. Only a small portion of those are based on the actual content of the page. It is those content-based ranking factors only that would be affected by the URL's content being flagged as duplicate. In fact, the duplicate page's content-based ranking factor scores are likely discounted based on the percentage of duplicate content on the page. So if they would have scored X, Y, and Z for 3 content-based ranking factors if the page was 100% original but the page has been flagged as 73% duplicate, Google might reduce their scores to 0.27*X, 0.27*Y, and 0.27*Z, respectively, since on 27% of the pages content was considered original. For the URL flagged as the original, they will get better scores on the content-based ranking factors because those content-based ranking factors will not have been discounted/devalued while all of the URLs whose content is flagged as duplicate will get much poorer scores on those content-based ranking factors due to being discounted/devauled because of the duplicate content. But since there are lots of other ranking factors NOT based on the content of the page, the duplicate pages can still out rank the original if they score considerably higher than the original on the other non-content-based ranking factors (such as the case where a duplicate has lots more relevent inbound links than the original where the link text contains the keyword phrase you are trying to rank for).