Duplicate Content Penalty

Of lately if your rankings plummeted, it is possible that your page contents have been duplicated causing a duplicate content penalty. By now we all are aware of the rigidity and discernment by which Google gauges the ranking of the sites. And if you don’t want that your hard work should become somebody else’s asset first of all include a copyright notice on the bottom of the page. Google simply barfs on the sites that offer multiple copies of the same content cluttering their results pages.
One aspect of the duplicate content penalty is that when the majority of the content on two seperate webpages (on different sites) is the identical, the webpage with the higher PR will be given preference and the other one will be automatically down graded. The page will be pushed down in the rankings.
The hardcore spammers leave no stone unturned to avail even the smallest of loophole of software programs to make their both ends meet. When they are at the end of rope and could only see the dead end for their site they usually jump into unethical methods. A part of their unscrupulous behavior is the use of scripts to produce a considerable amount of deceptive doorway pages composed by slightly changing the sentences and excerpts pulled from some high ranking site. Subsequently, each of these doorway pages is optimized unethically for a particular keyword phrase, but the search engine users come across the duplicate content. Search engines highly depreciate these useless pages and either they penalize the spammers by banning their domains or declaring them spam. A duplicate content penalty is a real nightmare for only unethical webmasters.
But still if you are tempted to replicate someone else's content, put a 'robots' meta tag in the head section to stop the search engine spiders indexing that page. If you feel like modifying, it would be courteous on your part to take the author’s acquiescence. But it can be time consuming. A better option would be to cook your own story by taking the central idea of the article and composing a fresh stuff from your perspective.
As a webmaster if you feel your content has been replicated, write to the website owner who has published your content without your consent requesting him to remove the text ASAP. You can also conclude that you will take the legal actions by reporting this offence to Google under their DMCA guidelines at http://www.google.com/dmca.html. Google has already declared war against all kinds of search engine spam and especially against duplicate content in all forms. There is also a "mirror" penalty for a site that is substantially duplicating another single site.

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