Duplicate Content: do Google really detect it?

Why am I wondering if Google can detect duplicate content? well, because I see many examples while online of people and websites who obviously are trying to trick the king of search engines, and who actually succeed.

Easy to copy!
Not with a very complicated infrastructure, nor by paying 10 215 people doing this and clicking there, which would be difficult for google to detect, but just by using very simple duplicate content technics (… I know, I was surprised too).

SEO Services Company Here!
An Example ? well, of course I come with an example for you, I know you would NOT believe me otherwise (I am not speaking about you mom, I know you believe me no matter what ;o)

So, here this Indian website, their technique is really simple, they target the search query or keywords “SEO Services Company” + “a place”.
For example : “SEO services company budapest” or “seo services company oxford”
They created a page for every city, or state, with the city keyword in the title and url. yes, only the city name was different, not the rest of the text of the page, which means that on this website, 99% of the words in each page are … the same. On each page, there are internal links to the other pages, with the name of the city in the achor text like on the picture here under :

Google says no: but obviously "YES YOU CAN"
Still, Google doesn’t  ban them. Actually it’s even worse (or better, depending on the point of view ;o), but they are ranking 1st on some of these cities! How come google doesn’t detect the trick while the pages are mearly copies ? I don’t know. I think it’s not that hard to compare the text of each page and see if 99% of the words are the same, or is it?

Black hat SEO is Risky SEO
I am not advising you to use this technique OF COURSE, that’s black hat SEO, and that annoys Google (and the people using it), because when you put “SEO Services company” with the name of a city, that clearly means that you want the company to be in that city, not in India (although India is beautiful). The day Google will be able to detect this fraud… the website is going down, deep down, and that would be a risk for your online business.

Google and Duplicate Content detection and NoFollow
It reminds me that everyone was thinking that google was taking the nofollow tag into account, until google (actually, matt cutts) said it didn’t. Isn’t it the same with duplicate content? Can they detect it?

Check the Rankings
You can check the rankings of this website I am talking about here under, In many cases, the website is ranking number one (and you can check your own rankings in google and baidu using our tool here). Also, let me know what you think about it, please use comments below to start the discussion:

impressive isn't it? well, still, don't follow this example... by the way "hhh" was just a test of mine that i forgot on the picture ;o)