Hello, If someone unknown to me, copies my content and posts it to their site, a search engine crawls it and finds the same content on my site (original), do I get a penalty or do they? Thanks, jDonald
I don't think either of you get a penalty. Google may show the other site higher in the rankings but if the other site is copying your content, they probably always do this and they probably don't have much authority with Google - you should be okay. There are tons of different views on duplicate content but if Google gave out penalties for duplicate content then no article directory would rank well, or have a decent PR, and many websites that post Press Releases would suffer the same. IMO it's just another thing Google considers when ranking sites and it's not always a bad thing. Just work on your site and giving your visitors what they are looking for and you should be okay - you'll go crazy trying to protect all of your content.
Here's a thread on this topic that might be worth a read: http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=699137
Don't let it happen ! If you make new content then check out if anyone has copied it by using copyscape.com Once this content has been on your site a good few months then you don't need to worry so much as your website is known to be the originator of that content - so it will be other sites who get penalized
the one that copied your content get penalize as long as your content has been crawled already by search engine spider you dont have to worry if others would copy your content.
If the contents of your site get indexed first then the other sites that copies your contents would have an issue on duplicate content not you. Google know who owns the contents.
yeah. if you write an article or something then just make sure to publish it on your site a few weeks before submitting it to article directories etc... that way you're shown as the original publisher