Originally Posted by signupdamnit

I think both of the mikes might be misunderstanding me a bit. It's not the post date you report or show on your site. It's the records Google keeps behind the scenes in an effort to ascertain who published the original content first. No one other than Google knows exactly how it works but try to consider how they might try to solve the problem. More than likely something like certain parts of the page are hashed and then a record is kept of the "first seen" date the content is seen and where it was seen. This is probably combined with other signals as Google calls it such as authority or maybe PR. Maybe there are signals to deal with brands too etc

Now what happens when the original publisher of the content as Google sees it goes offline without forwarding? Probably something like the next one in line becomes the original publisher as Google sees it. But if someone already scraped your old Thumblogger blog a year ago will the new site you put up be considered the original publisher? Possibly not.