Google hates it when you copy an article from another site and then copy it directly on to yours. As a matter of fact, if you write original content and then someone steals it from you, YOU will get penalized. So basically, don’t steal others content. It will hurt you and them.

So how can you avoid this? Well, if you are the publisher and want to avoid people stealing your work…

Put a copyright notice up - This won’t stop all the thieves, but it might stop some!

Email them - Send them a nice email asking you to remove the content… if they don’t respond, threaten legal action. I don’t know if there’s any legal action you can take, but it’s worth a shot.

If you are the thief (god forbid), or you just wanna publish some of your own content on your other sites, you have a lot of options.

NoFollow Tag - Put up a rel=”nofollow” in the link to that page to avoid search engines indexing it.

Article Rewriting Software - There’s a lot of it out there, just Google it. Unfortunately, they all seem to be a little expensive. There is a free one here, but I have never tried it.

Reverse Translation - This is a creative idea and my favorite one. Take the article you would like to rewrite and copy it. Paste it in to Google Translator and translate it into another language. Copy the translated copy and then translate it back to English. Voila! A brand new article. (Sometimes the translated version won’t make too much sense, but if you are only doing it for SEO purposes, then it won’t make too much of a difference).

Let’s test out my last method with the following block of text

Original - “Ancient China was one of the earliest centers of human civilization. Chinese civilization was also one of the few to invent writing independently, the others being Mesopotamia, Indus Valley Civilization, Maya Civilization, Ancient Greece (Minoan Civilization), and Ancient Egypt.”

Translated into Spanish - “La antigua China fue uno de los primeros centros de la civilización humana. La civilización china fue también uno de los pocos que inventar la escritura independiente, y los demás son Mesopotamia, el valle de Indus la civilización, la Civilización Maya, en la antigua Grecia (civilización minoica), y el antiguo Egipto.”

Spanish version translated back to English - “The old China was one of the first centers of human civilization. Chinese civilization was also one of the few to invent writing independently, and others are Mesopotamia, the Indus valley civilization, the Maya civilization in ancient Greece (Minoan civilization), and ancient Egypt.”

There you go… a fast way to copy and article without getting duplicate content penalties from Google. Hope it helps!