"Initially, there were 14 sites that featured the article, including my own. Within a few weeks, that number grew to approximately 19,000 or so sites, which also contained my website, which was the actual origin of the content. Then after about 5 or 6 weeks, the number of sites featuring the article fell to 46 sites. What’s aggravating is that my site, which was the source of the original content, was not included anywhere in the search results for this article title."

So the content filter works by eliminating from its rankings content which it deems is not original. But as Jennifer and SEO’ers across the web point out is this is clearly not always an accurate process. In fact if you are submitting articles on a regular basis and testing your results, you must have noticed this by now. Often if your article is plagerized not only are you penalized for dupe content but the perpetrator is rewarded with a steller ranking. Your ranking! Sadly if you are the original writer of stolen copy and Google decides otherwise, there isn't a whole lot you can do. Any by a whole lot I mean nothing.

So as it stands in 2006 tripping up Google’s duplicate content filter is a guaranteed way to kill your rankings - but for how long? For me it took 7 months to get back on the top page of Google at position number #9. A helluva long tumble from #1 for my very competitive keywords. Many domains never recover.

So how do you avoid this happening to you aside from always writing your own content? The bad news is you can’t. The good news is that it is no secret Google works very closely with