What about press releases? How will it affect syndicated content?

Google is going to penalize sites with link to download movies and music for the most, not for stealing some text or some pics (imo)... but what about Youtube? We'll see...

Thanks for sharing..!!!

I agree with you @Nicole. I am sent press releases often for publication. What I do mostly is re-write them anyway. But some of the content you cannot "revise." Now that I think about it, sites who get legitimate permissions won't have to worry. So all's well then! Thanks for the post!

It's definetly about time they started to do something about this situation. This is really good to hear finally.

This is pretty good for people who religiously write contents on their websites and bad news for content robbers.

Hmmm wondering the same as aidy and nicole. Anyone know? Thanks for the post

I would recommend reading reading Google's policy on duplicate content that should clear things up a lot they updated it on 3/23/2012 
 
http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=66359 
 
Have a good day!

Nothing worse than plagiarists. Sounds to me that Google could usefully employ a few people to check out sites for themselves, rather than wait for the few sites that will be taken through the endless and expensive circus of court proceedings.

While the content of press releases is copyright, the agencies that release them, in general, want the content to be re-transmitted in other channels! Why would you expect they would pursue someone for re-transmitting a press release? Geez...

One of my client's websites -- a news website -- gets 3.5 million pageviews a month, and I bet some competing sites "borrow" stories. Is there a vendor that offers help in monitoring plagiarism for a fee -- or does each site have to hire an attorney and a search specialist to watch for theft? Is this monitoring of plagiarism part of what a good SEO vendor offers?

@Paul Google says this about syndication: 
 
Syndicate carefully: If you syndicate your content on other sites, Google will always show the version we think is most appropriate for users in each given search, which may or may not be the version you'd prefer. However, it is helpful to ensure that each site on which your content is syndicated includes a link back to your original article. You can also ask those who use your syndicated material to use the noindex meta tag to prevent search engines from indexing their version of the content. 
 
(I still don't think this helps ease our concerns. Plus it's so vague.) 
 
As far as plagiarism, yeah that's not cool. We all know that. But what about journalists who might have multiple publications that are interested in an article they wrote? Doesn't this crack down hurt freelance writers?

One more thing: Is there any way to decide how many pages have to be copied each month to make it worthwhile to hire an attorney? Do I simply look for one site stealing a lot of my client's stories and go after them? I'm thinking Patch may be "borrowing" a lot of stories from legitimate news gatherers. If I see a number of Patch pages ranking higher for a local news story than my client's website, is that enough for me to act?

Smoke and mirrors by the "teflon don" geniuses at google..What about youtube where an overwhelming majority of music, tv, movies is uploaded and hosted with copyright violations. Google makes money on ads and the uploaders make money from the ads and hits on their videos...

Well and good that Google is working to protect creators of original content. However on a practical basis, how many people are actually going to pursue alleged infringers all the way to court to obtain a judgement? My guess is very few will do so.. thus, this change sounds good but in practice, will not change much.  
 
 
 
A preferred method would be to see which sites get more complaints of copyright infringement, and then notify the infringing site about the complaints and let them defend themselves/justify why their content is not infringing...

The moral of the story is? Be moral. Integrity costs you nothing :)

Great article with timely copyrighting tips! Thanks for the reminder!!!

Theft of my original content really annoys me! I just reported 2 sites and 4 total pages, that were nearly word for word copies of mine. Google banned all 4, but it took three tries to get the homepage banned. Keep it up, if needed, and I'm glad the thieves are getting punished.  
 
I even contacted the owner a couple months before I reported. He simply played dumb and wanted to know what exactly I wanted removed. Pi**ed me off! I knew his IP, date, time, and operating system when he came in and copied it. What an idiot!

Here's where I'm worried. I've had my content scrapped before, but I can't afford to go running to a court each time! Why can't Google just create a system where they identify who posted first? Wouldn't that solve the problem without requiring a huge outlay of cash each time someone steals my content?

That is good will it also abolish people stealing other peoples business names, I hope so as I have had too many of this happen already.

Also, it's essential to understand that attribution does not equal permission. You cannot copy a significant portion of someone's work and republish it even if you put it in quotation marks, attribute it and link back. All bloggers should understand fair-use laws. 
 
(It would be great to also mention that in the article linked to from "proper source attribution" here. Comments are closed for it.)

Google has updated something interesting day by day ,,, and I think this is valid for all the webmasters. Copyright protection should be done by Google himself ... Thanks for this information ...

Re the comment: "Not only is pirating content just poor internet etiquette" it should be noted that it's also usually illegal !

I so dislike acronyms. Understandably sometimes they creep in.  
SERP (search engine results page) may be well known to you but please make the meaning your acronym clear at the outset next time. 
 
Did you know SEPR also means "Self enrolled state pension"? 
 

@Maggie: Do you work for Google? @Computerz101: That article is 95% about duplicate copy within a domain, not outside plagiarists. This news from Google won't help any but the large companies who can afford to get legal judgments. The rest of us will continue to be ripped off.

Great article. There are probably billions of articles out there so it's pretty hard to police all of them.

Thanks for the article! 
 
Just wondering what will happen to those sites and companies who "spin" content to claim it as their own? Surely Google should look at this more seriously. I know of a number of sites around that do this on a daily basis and promote it for SEO.

I understand duplicate content being pusnihed but what about syndicated contents like @Nicole mentioned?  
 
 
 
I see that the update target those who steal contents from others but what about a company posting the original content on their blog and STILL post it on article directories with a link referring back to the blog (syndicate content?) to increase viewership. How will the update affect that?

I agree with @Gus van der Walt, the websites that need to be slammed are the ones that are just spinnning original content--claiming it as their own.

I'm glad to see Google is taking copyright infringement seriously. Although we ALWAYS give credit with a link (i.e. our company blog http://www.seo-e.com/), I hope it's enough. We do sometimes explicitly mention the source but sometimes not. Sometimes, we just link to the source material in the copy.

I agree that copied content is not a good practice and still I dont know how do you telling that duplicate content will hurt both websites? Will it affect the website of original content?

@Alex, I believe it affects the website of originial content because when someone search for content, Google will then compare the website with the orignial content and the website that copied the content and then Google will decide which one to show. If the copied content's website got higher authority and better SEO, Google might show that website over the original content's website. This will affect the ranking of the website with the orginial content.

There are chances that competitor can copy my website content and pull down my website list down in search engine. what is the solution to resolve this? Is there any way to ban the website which is copied my whole content and rank well?

I write an article on sales and business development for the Washington Business Journal every Monday. I also post the same content on my website with a link back to the WBJ site. Once a month, a publisher in Australia picks their favorite article and syndicates it on their site. All of this is with my permission. But, how does Google treat this circumstance? It is adversely impacting my search presence?

Now a days google give more inspected to all website in priority it's good for searcher's.

If I share an interesting topic..the original website too gets hurt ? That is really unfair. If they want to do so, the so called branded websites will lost their position.

Yes, Corey. Google brings new things every time, and is more alert. Bad time for Copyright violators.

this is a good update. but what will be the future of blogging & other activities where we will share content related to other site. 
 
Then so many sites going to be loose their positions & penalized by Google !  
 
Generating unique content every time will be so hard!  
 

Let's be clear that ethical content curation is still highly encouraged. 
My understanding is that these changes only impact sites that are clearly violating copyright and where Google has received a takedown notice through the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA). 
In most cases, if you are incorporating third-party content into your original or curated content, you'll be fine as long as you are doing it correctly (i.e. attributing sources, only sharing a portion of the third party content, linking back to the original source and adding your own value, commentary, etc).

You really would need to watch your search engine rankings/ results to see if this impacts you if you're using article marketing or press releases to market your work. Serial social media retweeters/ oversharers might also want to consider this an invitation to tone it down.

Stolen content has become a major issue. The only websites this will affect are thos ein violations who deserve penalty. Google, this is a great idea.

Makes sense for them to do this but should be interesting to see what they do with Youtube

SME's can't afford to go to court over this or don't have the time. 
 
It would be better if Google could show the article which was published first.

@bill from CT ... and others .. check out icopyright.com 
 
Their free plugin has a "track" tool, and says this; 
 
"...ever wonder if other sites have copied all or part of your articles? want to know where your articles appear on the web and which sites link to you or don't link to you? the track tool finds your articles and notifies you of sites using it. You can automatically send them notices to take it down, link to you, or licence it ..." 
 
Hope this helps.

Terrific post. I am new to social networking and was uninformed on proper internet etiquette. I want to do the right thing and now I have the information to insure that I do so. Thanks again.

Please advise - how can we copyright images (eg of our custom furniture designs)? How do we report people who use our images without authorization?