Duplicate content on another site?

Not sure if this is considered duplicate content

[thrasher141]

Hi, sorry if this is a beginner question. I recently stumbled across a website out there that is related to my company's industry. They have a bunch of content from my company's website and also our competitors - basically giving a profile of each company and their products. It looks like they have pulled a lot of content off our website word for word, though it's not formatted the same. Will this be seen as duplicate content, even though it's a totally different site?

Apparently this website optimizes keywords that you provide (probably using shady techniques from the looks of it) so that your content on their site will rank high. They then provide links back to your site. They also do this for a lot of our competitors. Does this sound like a good idea? I get a bad feeling from this company and their website, but somebody in our marketing group contracted with them for this service, I am trying to figure out if it's a good investment from a SEO point of view. I would appreciate any advice.

[Stefan]

Will this be seen as duplicate content, even though it's a totally different site?

Not in a way that will cause the complete disappearance of one of the pages. However, the original page that was scraped from will be competing with the scraped content page for the same serps. If they have more links, etc, they could be listed above you because of your own stolen content.

Apparently this website optimizes keywords that you provide (probably using shady techniques from the looks of it) so that your content on their site will rank high. They then provide links back to your site. They also do this for a lot of our competitors. Does this sound like a good idea?

It's all dodgy in the extreme. Doesn't sound like a good idea to me. The whole works could suddenly go missing next G algo change, and then the webmasters will be here as new members trying to figure out what happened.

[etechsupport]

Google policy says "If you create deceptive, misleading content on your behalf, such as doorway pages or throwaway domains, your site could be removed entirely from Google's index". I would suggest build it in right way, do everything else right.