Would you believe, the official Yahoo Music song lyric pages rank lower, even in Yahoo's own search engine, than copied lyrics pages?

That's quite true. According to this week's search engine results, official Yahoo Music song lyrics pages are outranked in the SERPs by sites copying lyrics.

Attributor, a company that provides content monitoring and analysis, released results of a research report analyzing the reuse of song lyrics online this week. The company said it used its technology to track Yahoo Music's song lyrics for 14 popular songs across billions of pages online for three weeks. Until recently, Yahoo Music was the only online lyrics site to pay royalties based on downloaded lyrics, the company said.

The study showed more than 1,500 lyrics matches, with more than 900 on pages that generate revenue from ads. And, copied lyrics outranked official Yahoo Music song lyrics over 80% of the time in the Yahoo search engine and 100% of the time in the Google search engine.

"Our research highlights the complex aspects of the content economy," Jim Brock, Attributor's CEO, said in a prepared statement. "Once their original content has been placed online, publishers have no visibility into how and where that content is being used. The lyrics research demonstrates the role search engines play in rewarding copied content."

According to an Information Week report, the company examined trends during September and used the top songs from across various genres on Billboard Online, including: Rihanna's Umbrella, Carrie Underwood's Before He Cheats, Fergie's Big Girls Don't Cry, Linkin Park's Bleed It Out, Sean Kingston's beautiful girls, You Can't Stop the Beat from the Hairspray soundtrack, Kayne West's Can't Tell Me Nothing, and Foo Fighters' The Pretender.