Ive found a number of duplicate sites that have copied all of my HTML, CSS, JS changed the logo of the company, placed the files on their own domain and are advertising them selves as a company doing the same work as us (eg. all the their images are ours, all the text is ours)....Does google take into account which site published the content first, eg. if its my original content thats been stolen could i get penalised if it shows up elsewhere on the web ?
When I searched google for certain websites, I've also seen duplicate websites indexed in google. Even though the layout has changed, the exact same paragraphs in the same order are there on the site. I just wished people at google will make bots that detect duplicate content better. Heck google should work on image recognition rather than google home 2.0... end rant.
Sad news is there will be at least someone (or even something a.k.a. robots) who will try to steal your content and publish it. The internet wayback machine is best at this.
What you need to do is literally tailor your website to focus on the user, not robots. For example, when the website first loads, set a cookie then issue a redirect to the main content and only show the main content with all the images properly loaded if the cookie is set. If the cookie is not set, then display an error page. That way, the only thing robots can copy from your site are error pages then the amount of duplicate content you have compared to the rest of the sites is tiny if anything.
Another option which may be of limited success is to redirect computers having certain IP addresses to the error page automatically. I say its limited because some IP addresses are shared between multiple users, but if the same IP address is trying to do terrible things to your server all the time, then redirecting requests from that IP address to error pages (or better yet, blocking the IP) will reduce the chance of content copying and will result in a faster server.