Google has penalized all the sites that used copied content on their site or used copied content in SEO to increase sites ranking.

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All I know about the latest Google algorithm is the panda. It is very sensitive when it comes to the content of a website.

Meaning, it penalizes all duplicate contents that a particular website has. You might lose your Google ranking if they caught you using duplicate contents to your site. To avoid this, much better to create or write your own unique content.

I was reading the comments here - sounds like a broken record..."Don't have duplicate content or Google will penalize you".

So then if I wanted to get rid of a competitor - all I have to do is copy their content, put it on blogger and my competitor will go down in flames along with my blog (in which I don't care happens to my blog)???

It's true that Google was aiming for content - but they were getting rid of sites that had "thin content". Thus, they went after "content farms" such as Squidoo, Hubpages, EZA etc. I've seen my hubs go down in the SERPs myself.

People were doing article marketing w/ very little info in their articles. Matt Cutts even looks down on article marketing since a lot of IM'ers were doing just that - crappy articles that basically were 500 words or less.

However, the end result is this (in which I believe we all can agree on) - unique content that makes sense. We are now seeing the true SEO ppl outsourcing around 1,000 words a web page and throwing it on their site - making sure though - it is carefully optimized.