Matt Cutts - is this true? Please tell me Google is not that bad!

No higher PR definately does not make you the owner, but it definately makes you rank higher then then the owner.

 

That is an excellent point and I wish it wasn't true ......but it is

 

that ridiculous..google needs to fix this or plagirism will rule..that being said you cant run adwords on plagirized content..its a good way to lose your account

 

i guess determining when an article is published can be tricky. say i have a software to mass distribute the article to ezine, articlecity, ...etc at the same time. they are all duplicates. original content is good but duplicates aren't. If you are google, what will you do? how can you be fair?

 

Well this is the option that should rule.

NO, Linked to and earliest indexed date is the owner!

If the document is found earliest on a domain and many duplicates link back to it that is a vote of confidence.

Now for me all this is simply theory until this is proved out in our first trial test, and this option is being tested because the article has been online for over a year and has many duplicate linking back to it, including the test duplicate.

Duplicate Content Knock Out Experiment

and many more test will follow to prove and disprove SEO theories.

 

I totally agree as well, but you have to look at it in an overall perspective.

Firstly it means Google would have to keep every cache snapshot of every document ever crawled. I think there's around 8 Billion documents cached by Google, so keeping every page ever cached over the years and it's modifications would result in trillions then the server resources required to check each cache against trillions would be huge.

Take this thread for example, Google crawls it with 1 post and caches it. Comes back and there's 2 posts and caches it, times by 20 posts per page means keeping 20 page versions instead of the most recent.

The Q3 Pagerank thread for example has 342 pages, so that many pages cached. If it kept every version it would have 6,838 versions of that thread. (This is assuming Google crawls the thread after every post)

Then we have the scenario of which cached version does Google check against to determine if the document is duplicate? If a document changes significantly and i publish the old version elsewhere is it still duplicate content despite the fact the document does not exist at any other URL on the web for a user to read?

What if the original no longer exists, or what if i loose my domain name and set-up the same site on a different URL? My second site wouldn't rank because Google says my new URL wasn't the first to publish the content.

You are assuming everyone who scrapes content links back. As someone else mentioned which is a good point, alot of scraper sites are low authority MFA sites that generally won't outrank you.

It's 100% fact, the first article was indexed on your site long before mine and in 10 hours i was beating it for exact terms in quotes.

I've lost track of the clients who come to me saying, "I had an article on my site for 2 years, wanted some backlinks so i submitted it to a bunch of article directories now i've lost all trafic to it and EzineArticles are beating me".

 

On the other hand, it does mean that if you have a decent ranking site, you can grab new articles from ezinearticles etc and put them on your site and outrank both ezinearticles and the original article.

I've done this a few times and yes it does work.

So yes, someone could steal your content and outrank you.

 

Totally agree. I forgot to copy the example i saw while searching for some drupal tutorial.

One guy written a drupal tutorial and exact page is syndicated by a large RSS site.

The RSS site is ranking higher than the poor original author.

 

I really haven't seen any evidence of this at all. Please provide some.

 

still ongoing..