tedster - 1:08 pm on Jun 21, 2012 (gmt 0)

Hello contacttoavinash, and welcome to the forums.

If content is being copied from an already strong website like the NYTimes - a site with strong authority and trust already well established - then the copied content is not going to harm it and it may also help it. When a site is low in trust or authority, copied content can sometimes undermine existing rankings, at least today.

We'd like to think that Google can accurately assign the "original author" of a bit of content - but sometimes they still seem to get it wrong. I'm not sure yet where their error come from exactly. It may well be a combination of their freshness algorithm and their desire to serve more popular sites higher in the results - just my guess.