Interesting article about duplicate content

[Dr.Marie]

Check this out:

http://dejanseo.com.au/hijacked/

The author successfully scraped and ranked for several high profile websites' content. If I'm understanding the article right, the website with the higher page rank is the one that Google considers the originator.

Also, having authorship didn't seem to help at all.

Yikes

[Darrin Ward]

Very interesting... hummm should I go blackhat? lol.

As I was reading through I was curious about the regionality/au part and then he mentioned it.

[phatmike10]

Interesting that if a duplicate has higher PR it ranks higher and steals the PR of the original article. Surely it should be the other way round, Google should rank the original article higher and the original should gain the PR of the duplicate pages. This would also help deter spammers as by duplicating content they would be bolstering the PR of the original article.

[KernelPanic]

hmmm, Google has always said that they give cred to the one they see first.

I wonder if the different local TLDs threw them off.

[joshz]

I've seen this done a thousand times.

[Darrin Ward]

I've seen this done a thousand times.

I have seen higher PR dupes rank higher lots of times, but the part about the info: and the +1's is new to me.

[Highland]

It makes sense from a syndication standpoint.

Podunk Review writes an article. They post it on their website.
AP sees the Podunk Review article. They repost on their website via syndication. Hundreds of sites are now posting this article.
Then the New York Times runs it. It still attributes the original author but when people are searching for it, from a logical standpoint, the content really should reside with NYT, not Podunk Review, because that's where most people saw it first. I do think the info: search is a bug, however.

The problem is that I don't think Google foresaw scraping. I also think that first published might not be worth as much, especially if your site is a less popular one. A PR7 site will get crawled much faster than a PR1 and if they both publish about the same time the PR7 might just win.