Will Google index stolen blocked content?

[fargo1999]

If I protect my content in robots or by NOINDEX,NOFOLLOW from being indexed and someone copies my text, will Google still list the page that copied my content?

In other words - does Google check and compare who was the original (the first) publisher and then they won't list the website that stole my content EVEN IF I decided not to allow my site to be indexed?

[tedster]

If you use robots.txt to block googlebot, then Google has no record of what your site contains. Then anyone one steals your content and serves it from their own domain will be able to get it indexed and ranked.

I'm not sure about the meta robots tag approach - because then Google does at least have a copy of your content. If I were forced to guess, I'd guess that the same result would still happen - a content thief could still rank and you would need to use legal means to fight it.

[fargo1999]

I was hoping Google would still 'look over' my content and mark it as "content was read: the original author" and then when I either remove the content or disable spidering it will not list it elsewhere... Even though the problem might be if I wanted to list my content later on another domain instead, but that would be very rare case..

[Shaddows]

My "feel" for this is that
1) Google only wants to rank the same content once
2) GIVEN 1, it tries to be fair to the original author by listing them first

So if the original author isn't being ranked, but the content is worthwhile, G will rank it. It isn't actually G's job to police copywrite infringement unless its hosted by them (think YouTube).