Everyone knows stealing other people’s content is just plain wrong, but also means you won’t rank well or at all in Google. However very few people have the pleasure of seeing their content taken all the time, for many years to see the true damage it can have.
Out of the 10+ years I have been at this biz, I or people that work for me have produced well over 100,000 bits of content like marketing, full out articles, interviews, etc.
Within that time, there have been articles that rank well for many terms, and every once in a while there is just one article or term that you really take a liking to, and start to track its over the long run.
I have noticed the more people copy the entire article and repost it on other sites, the less valuable Google views your site as the first source.
As its always been a slow rate of deprecation, I have come to the conclusion that Google has chosen not to value the first source as much due to that you are not regulating your copyright rights on the stolen content, or that after so many years Google starts to lose track as the data falls of the backend of their database, and its becomes harder for them to determine the first source of the content.
While both cases could be true, its not something I’m really worried about, because as time goes on, the stolen content becomes less valuable and the people that have taken, end up losing more money than they gained from the theft.
In any event the content that gets a lower level of theft, continue to rank as they have been over the years, while the content that gets taken, slowly drops in value. You should not let this get to you, as you can easily fix this problem by getting more links to your content, and thus establishing your copy as the authority copy.


The Long Term Affect of Content Theft - Read More...