macman23 - 6:35 am on Mar 1, 2007 (gmt 0)

Your best bet is to re-write all your content completely as quick as possible, and never believe that competitors cannot harm your site, if they duplicate it to nothing then the claim is a farce.

Yes, but that shouldn't be necessary. The point is that, while copied content is a nuisance, Google should not be penalizing the sites with the original text. It amazes me that with Google's advanced algorithms, sites with the original content get forced to the bottom of the search results.

The site I run that has been copied ranks ahead of the duplicates in Yahoo!, MSN, Ask, and every other search engine I have checked. Google is the only one that has hammered me down to the bottom. Preventing spam is one thing, but it seems that Google has over-extended their algorithms so that sites that deserve to rank highly get filtered out. I can only hope that Google will see this as a serious issue.