It's essentially the 'duplicate content' penalty/penalties. [1] It's pretty ironic really... take a look at this scenario... Let's say we have Website A which

It's essentially the 'duplicate content' penalty/penalties. [1] It's pretty ironic really... take a look at this scenario... Let's say we have Website A which we'll consider a "legitimate" website producing unique and quality content and we have Website B which is not, but it has some clever people running it's scrapers/submissions.. Developer responsible for Website B has identified that Website A produces quality content that it wants to steal - setups up a scraper to check for updates on Website A, when it finds them it will immediately scrape the content and repost it on Website B. Then they will update their sitemap and submit it to Google (or some other of the various ways to 'alert' google of a new page/updated content) which will trigger a crawl of that page/website. If this crawl/index of Website B happens before Website A - who does Google see as the producer of that content and who is now the "duplicate"? Whack-a-mole. 1: https://backlinko.com/hub/seo/duplicate-content https://backlinko.com/hub/seo/duplicate-content