anallawalla - 6:27 am on May 23, 2010 (gmt 0)

The advice is kind of contradictory there; on the one hand it says no one can really do anything deliberate to affect your seo ranking on the other hand, if you have say 20 other sites duplicating your content word for word, you will be affected seo-wise

Paul86, What Robert is saying is that should a site with more authority and backlinks e.g. CNN.com copy your content (with your permission or otherwise) then it is possible that your site may get filtered out from search results.

The difficulty is when the original site and the 20 copying sites are fairly obscure sites (unknown to each other). This is fairly common with the sites that practise article submission and republication.

Now one or two of those sites can be more "authoritative" and have more "quality" backlinks than the original publisher, so it is possible for one of them to become the "original" publisher.