lets say one site is already well established, and ranks high in search engine results. then someone comes copies this, all the seo optimization on the incumbant's page. what happens to the new site with the same content as the original. does it climb up SERP ? is it technically stealing SERP ?
The second site will be treated as mirror site and you know google always dislikes mirror sites. So it will be out of the race.
what if the second site was changed slightly. templates layouts and content is slightly modified. more importantly how the content is displayed is totally different.
Change is template layout doesn't matter. Even the slight change in content is not going to fool google.
Google does not validate the second site as it is nothing but a mirror site and the second site looses its credibility. You can confidently say that it would be red flagged by Google bots. And if there is adsense on the second site, then its confirmed that within a few days, the account would receive a banned mail. No matter whether you change the layout or the paragraph structure of the postsi n the scond site, it does not help as Google's algorithm can find out the similarities based on the formation of the sentence but not on the location of the sentence. You got my point, right? Its best to avoid duplicating the content all in all. Its better to modify the content a little and direct the reader to the first site stating 'You can read more here'. Hope this helps.
I have seen competitors do this, i.e. have two duplicate sites on two domains. They seem to do quite well in SERPs.
The question should end, 'what do you think will happen' I say this because no one knows for sure how each site will react at any given time. A constant problem in the online marketing sector, people state fact when they should state opinion Here's my thoughts Google has stated it applies ownership to content based on first indexing, problems arise if content is copied and subsequently indexed first, Google are aware this happens and are looking for a solution. We also have the people who see themselves off by syndicating their own content before indexing. Plagiarism is a big no no at Google so I imagine at some stage the copied site will either be banned or booted to the back of the index. If the site belonged to me I would instruct our solicitors to start legal proceedings against the site owner and designer, as well as speaking to the sites host provider and nominet. Most teenage, bedsit dwellers are quick to act when they feel the net closing in.
Yes, this is the only fool proof method we can think of. But google might have different algorithms to check original and duplicate contents
So if I have a 10 year old site that has been sat doing nothing expect displaying a landing page, all I need to do is copy the contents of a younger site and, hey presto! Does it really work like that?
No, i think they meant to say age of the content, not age of the site. For instance publication date and moreover actual date on Google's index.
That's right the date the content was first indexed will show ownership. As I stated earlier the only issues that can affect this are sites stealing new content that have a quicker indexing cycle. People that stupidly write content add it to their website and then freely distribute around the web, more often than not ownership will be attributed elsewhere. The question is not well presented as the obvious answer to what would happen if someone copied your website, is nothing.