First up, I spotted someone copying content from my site this week. He'd pasted together text from one of my pages, with another paragraph of text from another site and used it to make himself out an authority writer. This cobbling together of content seemed to work, and he pushed me below himself and Netscape (he'd also posted the content there). Presumably his domain has "trustrank" to be able to get away with this. His homepage has PR5 if that means anything at all.

I contacted him, told him he was out of order, and he has removed the content from his own site. The Netscape content remains though, although I have tried using their "report" link to point out that the text wasn't written by the submitter. Part of the message I sent him also pointed out that pretty much his entire site's content, on a huge variety of topics was written by other people and would he like me to contact 20-30 or so of them which may have helped sway his decision or not.

Now I'm starting to look at other sites that come up with top ten Google positions for keywords that relate to my site. Not sure whether to be surprised or not, but there are several that are populated with content that copyscape quickly and (seemingly accurately) reveals has been simply scraped, copied & pasted from other, much older sites.

Is is a serious nono for me to start reporting this kind of thing through Google? Would you do it if a site ranked better than yours for your favourite keywords on the strength of content they didn't (and quite likely would not be capable) of writing themselves?

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Andy Fletcher, not the famous one.