Isn't part of the core of pagerank that certain domains are more trustworthy than others?
Given that this is supposedly true, wouldn't the same content on stackoverflow out rank a random new domain with the same content
Given that this is supposedly true, wouldn't the same content on stackoverflow out rank a random new domain with the same content
What I think ultimately happens is Google is notified and these sites are eventually deindexed. But this still leads me to really question the whole duplicate content theory sometimes. If Google was so tight about this, these sites would never show up in the first place.
It could also be that the tech terms searched for are not as competitive as, say, medical or diet or celeb terms. Maybe Google's just grabbing at any kind of relevancy at this point, duplicate or not.
Then again, I'm sure that there are plenty of top 1000 domains that would use this to their advantage too, oh well.
While it would be hard for these sites to match the cumulative reach of SO, they will have an easier time getting specific pages to rank highly. This can also be abused with a system where most pages link to the .1% of pages that should be emphasized. In this fashion, smaller sites can throw their weight around and get specific pages to rank more highly than bigger sites.
Trying to solve this issue on a purely technical level turns out to be a lot more complicated than it would seem. It is made much worse by how damaging false-positives are for a search engine (Google censored me!). So the result is that this often only gets resolved by manual actions rather than automatic penalties.