Google Ranking Scraped Material on Top?

Today I was doing a small research around the Internet to see how many people was scraping my articles. Needless to state there was a whole bunch of them. The interesting thing, however, was to discover that when I performed narrow search queries with sentences that were contained in my articles, Google would return the scraper site on top, and my original content on the supplemental results.

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For example, I searched for “the user should be able to see all the navigation options straight way”, quotation marks included to make it an exact match. That sentence was coming from my most popular article, 43 Web Design Mistakes You Should Avoid.

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Google found 1 page with that sentence, and it was a scraper site violating copyright. The original article was in the supplemental pages. The same pattern was found on pretty much all my popular articles.

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Maybe the deal was specific to my site, I thought, so I decided to test with some other authority blogs. Next I searched for “Tip Jars and donation buttons have been a part of blogging for years now”, which is a sentence coming from one of the most popular posts on Problogger, How Bloggers Make Money from Blogs. This time four results appeared, and all four of them were scraper sites. The original entry was on the third supplemental page.

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Finally I searched for “Instead of using the throwaway plastic utensils available at work”, which is coming from an article on LifeHacker. You can’t have much more authority than these guys, so this was the acid test. Guess what, once again Google returned 4 pages, and all of them were scraper sites.

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Try to perform a search for exact sentences coming from your popular articles. Are the scraper sites ranking above your original content? Do you know why Google behaves that way or how one could fix the problem?

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Update: Maybe it was not clear on the post, but this problem happens only when I search for exact sentences contained on the articles. If I search for one or two keywords related to the title they will still rank on the first page of results.\n

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