Original content is what Google loves, well, because users love it too. Google strives to produce relevant search results and does not want to serve up users variations of duplicate content. When duplicate content is detected, page rank will fall and credit will go to the original poster. But how does Google know who is the original author and who to give credit to? Following this, how do you protect your original content?

It is quite difficult for Googlebot to figure out who is the original author of the content its crawling. If Googlebot could crawl every site in the world simultaneously, then yes, this would be easy. But it’s not feasible to do so. Googlebot can only crawl a finite number of pages in a given time period. Therefore, it has to take a staggered approach yet crawl sites with higher PageRank more frequently.

What about those shady sites ripping off your content? Or the shady approach of changing the page’s timestamp to an earlier publish date than yours in order to spoof Googlebot into thinking the copier is the original author? Matt Cutts, head of the Google Webspam team, offers a few suggestions to help Google figure this out.

1) Tweet out your new content immediately. This will allow your followers to engage with it, retweet it, and allow Googlebot to find your content a lot quicker.

2) Integrate PubSubHubbub with your content. This protocol is to provide almost instant notifications of change updates in your content.

3) If you find your content copied, file a complaint with that site sending a DMCA (Digital Millenium Copyright Act) notice as well as alerting Google of the issue.

Source: How to Ensure That Google Knows Your Content is Original