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I sure the hell ain't no SE guru but this topic has been popping up a bit lately so I thought I might want to look into it a bit. Especially since I use RSS feeds in a couple of places, including sponsor feeds and I also have my feeds published a number of places. So, a SE penalty would really hurt.
My conclusion is that there definately is a duplicate content penalty. That having been said, I also believe that the content duplication has to be on a fairly large scale in order to take affect and I've decided that it probably isn't the type of penalty that is going to kill you in the long run anyway.
According to James D Brausch, the self proclaimed founder of the term "Duplicate Content Penalty", if you were to submit an article to 300 sites, it would take Google about 6 weeks to see it and then react to it. But I'm not so sure I would consider what happens next a penalty. According to Mr. Brausch, you would then see the following "In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the 16 already displayed. If you like, you can repeat the search with the omitted results included."
If it's my content, I don't see a penalty here as long as all my links and affiliate codes are left in tact and if they are not well that's a whole different story since it moves it from a duplicate content penalty to content theft. So even if I don't end up in one of the top 16 slots before Google cuts off the listing, I still can be pretty content that my post is still getting exposure and that I have sites higher in the SERP's than me linking to my content, thus improving my overall positioning within Google.
Now if I'm using someone else's content and don't figure into the top 16, then I guess a small penalty has been imposed but looking at the time frame, 6 weeks, I doubt that will hurt much and from everything I can tell, it has no adverse affects on anything else having to do with my site. At least, I've yet to find any concrete proof that it does.
In fact, the whole myth aspect of this is probably rooted in the fact that it does take such a high number of iterances of the content being copied that it is un-noticable to the honest webmaster who used a few feeds here and there. The only place where you might need to be careful is with using sponsor feeds or creating a blog from nothing other than sponsor feeds. These could easily start to fall within that category and if that is the only content on your blog, work to strangle it to just the few visitors you can get from link trades and directory submittals.
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