Duplicate Content - The Word Straight From Google

There are discussions all over the web about duplicate content, whether intentional, accidental or malicious copying. With regard to real estate sites, the topic has been discussed extensively at Activerain.com, as many bloggers there have the same content in more than one place.

Google recently ran a post on their blog specifically addressing duplicate content and Google rankings. The post pretty much puts to rest the fear that the original site will be penalized. Google says that their system is quite good at determining where the first instance of the material was posted.

They also provide some guidance on avoiding accidental duplicate content within your own site, as well as how to use your sitemap to have intentional duplicate content properly indexed. With scrapers, intentionally taking content to monetize it, Google knows it's happening, and I ddn't see any reference to doing anything much about it. The post seemed to be focused on letting us know that, if our content is scraped, Google can determine and properly credit the originating site in the index.