Duplicate Content, what is the real deal?

Google will not penalise you, you wrote the content first

 

Your site will not be penalized because other people copy its contents. Sites get penalized for trying to manipulate the search engines. You cannot control whether someone copies your content or not.

That said, it would be a good idea to put links in your content to other pages in your site. That way, if/when the content is scraped (stolen) it has links to your own site, the originator of the content.

Scrapers aren't rocket scientists. Neither are those that use scrapers. And they are likely lazy as already mentioned. One would have to manually go through the scraped content to remove the links. All the better if there were no links to remove!

And there's no point getting upset about having your content stolen. Don't take it personally. It's a script/program that stole it, not a real person. In most cases anyway.

Also, you CAN protect your content by having it noterized by a place like copyrightdeposit.com. Basically they keep a copy of your content on file as proof that it is, in fact, yours. If you were to dispute copyright ownership, this is very helpful. Oftentimes all one needs to do is email the site owner and show your copyrightdeposit number - aka proof that you did copyright it, know the content is stolen, and can prove it.

However, also know that the biggest reason why copyright law isn't enforced on the internet has everything to do with the vast and widespread amount of copyright infringement (content being stolen/scraped etc) going on. That, and the fact that prosecution costs money. Unless you are a huge corporation with deep pockets... you can't do a darned thing about it.

 

I had a problem with my articles with backlinks to my site ending up on scraper blogs full of spammy links all over the place. Like what's already been said, you shouldn't get penalized for dupe content as long as you're the original author. I usually post my articles on my own site or blog first and when it's indexed, no matter where else the article shows up afterwards, Google will know what is dupe.

 

"when it's indexed" dude that is the problem...

it currently takes 2 days (on average) for every new article I post to be indexed by google... which technically means that during that time... any autoblog can grab my article and get it indexed quicker

right?