When it comes to duplicate content, authority matters more to Google than who published it first.  In other words, if my link profile is stronger than yours and I take your content… IT’S MINE (especially if I get it indexed first).

This can be both good and bad news:

  • THE GOOD - If your site has high SERPS, high amount of incoming links, lots of visitors, and a high PR, you can go around stealing other people’s stuff all day!  The amount of content up for grabs will be limitless.
  • THE BAD - Well, if your rankings suck, expect your shit to be stolen by a bigger site and have them ranking higher on Google for it.  Life isn’t always fair… right?

The only way you can really avoid this is to become as much of an authority figure as you can in your niche.  Build up links, build up traffic, and build up search positions so you can be safe from this (and possibly steal others content if you want).

On a forum I frequent, one guy posted a related story:

About a year and a half ago I was running a big ass article marketing campaign for a client. We were publishing content like a mother fucker and 1/4 of the articles went into the cue for distribution. Distribution did not take place until content passed a check that it was indexed throughout the major SE.

There was this damn newspaper in India (authority site - nice age, nice link profile etc) that was frequently picking shit up that I syndicated and when they did I’d say 80% of my pages that had been syndicated when supplemental and the India site was credited with the articles.

The client site did have some internal dupe issues that were in the process of being corrected so that probably assisted the Indian site in taking ownership of the content but I don’t think it was the main issue.

Now I haven’t run any syndication that large in a bit so like I said before that Data is a bit old but I changed my content syndication methods after that situation.

So start marketing your site now and get it big! Cause if your content gets stolen by a big bully, there’ll be nothing you can do but cry about it.