Content duplication

what's googles take... on what google takes

[Fiver]

just want to clear up this question in my brain.

Google's problem with duplicate text is a within domain problem (or, arguably, a within class c problem) - as obviously google cannot penalize both sites which have the same content, or we could all penalize our competition.

So I just want to know if it's an accepted notion that Google does not penalize the original publisher of the text. Of course, this loosely translates to whoever google happens to index first... it really doesn't have anything to do with who wrote the content first.

Am I wrong in thinking that this is the only logical way google could identify the 'original' text?

[Brett_Tabke]

Right. Age of the content is what matters and this is where the depth of Googles crawls are so important.

[Fiver]

seems to me this is another loophole such-minded people could possibly take advantage of.

though not a gaping one.

[allanp73]

I always wondered about content that is used more than once. I don't use content in order spam the search enigne but I do use it to help the user. There are cases when duplicate content is required. For example I have a group of real estate sites serving different areas who all use a similar (almost same) glossary. The glossary helps users understand the terms used on the sites. I don't think this content should get ignored by the search engines because it is useful to the user.