Ive gone off doing authority blog since Panda

The post in question doesn't support any proof of his claims. He says:

He makes this statement because someone outranked him with his own content...this by no means has anything to do with who wrote what and when it has everything to do with the originator not protecting his own work and if he can't be bothered to do so then this can happen.

I have real authority sites that are between 5-8 years old. One of those sites that is 6 years old has over 3000 posts and this blog has been scraped constantly. At one point some guy started an autoblog empire of 240 blogs with each scraping my blog. The DMCA request sent to his host, domain provider and Google was lengthy to say the least. But my site was never penalized.

There have been rare cases , and I do mean rare, where scraped content has outranked the original content. This can be rectified by making sure you have personal information appended to all web content so Google knows who really wrote it and when. There are various plugins that append this information as a digital fingerprint. It also ads copyright info and any other words you want it to say such as " This content is from bla.com and if you read it elsewhere then this is copyright infringement".

There have been several times over the years when I have worried about scraped content...then you realize that other than taking precautions such as the plugin I mentioned, there is absolutely nothing you can do...if someone wants to scrape your content they will...and unless there are some rare alignments of moon and stars then it shouldn't even be a problem. But you have to make sure you do your due diligence in protecting what is yours.

The autoblog empire guy that scraped over 400 posts to each of his 240 blogs wanted a quick buck...he never looked to see that each post had my copyright information attached to it. Because he was lazy and stupid he lost 240 blogs, the time it took to make those blogs, his hosting account and his adsense account.

Thanks for the reply.

I have to disagree though about it being rare, read Google groups for example, since Panda people are having a lot of problems with being penalized because of scraped content, either by drop in rankings because other sites are ranking above them with their own content, or the links message from Google, it is something you have no power over.

Of course not everyone who gets scraped gets penalized, but a lot of people are at the moment, which I hope sorts itself out.

I would say it does, if I write my own content I don't want to get punished in some way, either in form of the links message or being outranked, by someone else who has stolen my content.

For the post I linked to its obvious they wrote the content, but Google still isn't doing anything about it, and even if they do, whats to stop it all happening again, even with protection like a copyright message?

Also what happens if a scraper scrapes your content but checks the end/beginning of the posts for any copyright info and deletes it?

The other option is of course is just not to have a RSS feed so they cannot automate your articles in the first place (I think), what negatives do you feel this would have? Is an RSS feed a necessity?

And what about people just copying and pasting your stuff onto forums and sites and what not? A guy on Google groups did FAQ on games and was having his stuff pasted left right and centre and said hes been hit with a slap...Now I don't know if their is more to it as he didn't post the site so couldn't delve more into it, but do you worry about that?

Maybe I am in a melodramatic mood today.