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Earlier in the week I was reading one of the better known marketing blogs from the United Kingdom which, it seems, is a scrapers delight. The blog owner was complaining bitterly that a number of his posts were not appearing on the first page of the Google search engine results pages for important terms that he had targeted but sites that had scraped his posts certainly were.

I suppose that if you're a scraper then it's good news that, while Google can certainly identify duplicate content, Google can't yet decide who actually owns the content. At the same time as it's good news for the scrapers it's bad news for those who generate the original content because getting seen by Google as the real owner of the content is a battle that's almost impossible to win.

I'm not even sure that the question of how to identify the original owner of content that has been duplicated is all that important to Google. Only yesterday another Google patent surfaced that dealt with how Google actually identified duplicate content.

While this is a new patent it doesn't actually have much that's new in the way the process operates, instead it is a way to bring together a number of distinct functions that Google already uses and combines them into a single filter. Once again there is no mention of any way of identifying the original owner of the content and that's vital for those of us who do produce original content.

There's nothing more frustrating and demoralizing than to see scraper take an excellent piece of work that you've produced and that is getting a lot of search engine hits and reproduce it as his own and have Google rank his or her site over your own for the keywords that you had worked so hard to target.

I suppose that in lots of ways we shouldn't really expect Google to care about who produced the original work. Their job - as they see it - is to search and index the Web as cheaply and effectively as possible and it's of no real consequence to Google who actually wrote the content they're indexing.

I suppose that there will be some people who would suggest that Google has more ethics than to be so uncaring about who writes the content they index. However the entity that lurks behind the Google façade of do no evil is quite different to what many people see and the question of authorship of content is only one thing that Google cares little about.

Several weeks ago we saw a brief mention of another situation that shows that Google isn't all that bothered by anything other than its bottom line. A report briefly surfaced that suggested that there were something like 6% (if I remember correctly) of websites that were indexed by Google that contained malicious content that could infect a surfer's computer with all sorts of viruses, trojans and other nasty bits and pieces.

Google admitted that they were aware of sites that they listed that contained that content and they conceded that the 6% figure was about right. So if Google knows that it's listing malicious websites and displaying those sites on various search engine results pages then why aren't they doing more to warn surfers about those listings? Admittedly from time to time you may see a warning against a site that appears in a search engine results page but that warning doesn't necessarily jump off the page at you ... at least the warnings that I've seen have been fairly subdued.

And then you have to ask yourself why, if Google can identify these malicious websites, isn't Google removing them from the database? Obviously it's going to take money to do that but Google isn't exactly strapped for cash now is it? However, what does Google actually gain by removing those sites?

In overall terms 6% of the sites indexed by Google is a pretty insignificant number - especially if you're not the one who is going to have their computers infected - and we are talking about viruses and trojans that people won't necessarily notice if their computers are infected. If that's the case then perhaps Google doesn't see those 6% of sites as any threat to their reputation as the best search engine around. If there's no threat to their reputation or their business goals then perhaps there's no need to waste money on it.

Compare that lack of response to several genuine concerns with the way Google reacts if they think that you might be playing the search game by your own rules instead of Google's. If you don't play by Google's rules then they're all over you with hand penalties and outright bannings and all you might have dared to do was sell a few links or create a few doorway pages.

Now how does that compare to building sites loaded with malicious content that can infect a person's computer and steal their data?

Perhaps it's just us who are out of step with Google; perhaps our concerns don't rate very highly at all and so are of no importance whatsoever. Perhaps, if it doesn't affect Google's bottom line then Google just doesn't care.