Is this plagarism?

[WhiteboardCreations]

Are site owners relinquished from plagiarism when copying word for word from another blog almost daily, as long as they reference the source? This blog www.nethority.com/blog has copied everything from the Moz blog, however, references the source at the bottom.

Can this hurt a website/blog as duplicate content?

I'm interested to know what everyone's take is on this. - Patrick

[WhiteboardCreations]

Thanks Federico, Moosa and Keri for your input! I was guessing that's exactly what the responses were going to be, especially Keri's with respect to making sure it's stated that credit is provided where credit is due.

I get referencing data, but just copying word for word, even the title of the articles is a bit much, and very lazy. At least change the title to be somewhat unique and summarize the content into your own words, THEN provide the source link for "Read more here....."

Thanks, again! - Cheers! Patrick

[WhiteboardCreations]

Thanks for the references, Eric!

[KeriMorgret]

It's best to look at the terms of use of the site. Our terms say something to the effect you can republish, but we need credit. Sadly, many people ignore that, and try to make it look like they wrote the post.

[MoosaHemani]

This is the most ethical way, when you copy content from some other blog or resource, it is ethical to ink back to the original source. This will tell users, where the original article is located but will this help killing the duplicate content issue?

I believe no, Google try using different parameters to figure out, which is the original version of the post but unfortunately there are times when blog who copies the content get better organic ranking then the original blog.

If you are really coping the post for some other purposes and do not want to kill the organic rankings of that domain, in that case, it is ideal to use cross domain canonical as this will tell Google where the original content is located.

Hope this helps!!

[FedeEinhorn]

You can rest assure that the scraper blog WILL NOT rank above Moz's results.

As Eric said, Google's Matt Cutts pointed out that Google has several techniques to recognize the original source of an article/content.

In this case, the content isn't helping the blog, and it can even be penalized for duplicate content and/or rank far below as it isn't adding any value.

On the DMCA side, while they point to the source, why will the source bother? They get backlinks, Google knows who's the original writer, etc., nothing to worry about.

IF there was no link to the source, then I would advise taking action, otherwise, they are probably doing you a favor

[WestAdvertising]

Great article on this. Although it does not discuss your duplicate content question. http://www.technshare.com/discover-eliminate-and-avoid-stolen-content/

There is also this from the DCMA
http://www.dmca.com/takedowns.aspx

Google's Matt Cutts has said that their algorithm makes every effort to identify the original content and rank it higher than the scraped content. Unfortunately, this is not always the case.