Anyone who develops websites knows the importance of fresh content. Sometimes you may think content is fresh, but maybe someone wrote something for you and you did not check it with copyscape.
You could have both a plagiarism and duplicate content problem. Search Engine land published an article today on how Google will now alert you to the problem.
Taken from the article:
Today, Google webmaster tools has launched a new message alert to let site owners know when a particular URL doesn’t appear because Google sees it as duplicate of a URL on a different domain. In the blog post announcing the feature and in an in-depth help topic, they provide details on how they identify duplicate clusters of content and choose a “canonical” version of that cluster to display in search results.
“When we discover a group of pages with duplicate content, Google uses algorithms to select one representative URL for that content. A group of pages may contain URLs from the same site or from different sites.”
Read the whole article at Searchengineland.com