Unless of course, it’s the article I spent so much time writing and submitting yesterday… :nono:
Seriously though, articles are commonly reprinted all over the web without penalty to the news sites that grab ’em off the wire, so is this potentially just SEO paranoia?
I think it’s more a matter of how they’re used. If you’re using articles like traditional news items; displaying author, time/date, rotating in new articles on a regular basis, mixing them into an already content rich environment and staying clear of spammy marketing tactics, I’d say you’re fine.
If, on the other hand, you slap all the articles in a DB and pump out 6 million pages of the same schlock on site after site after site, and send out a blog spamming bot to get ’em linked and crawled, you might get dropped at some point. Is that then the duplicate content that got the sites dropped?
These are two extremes at either end of the spectrum, but my point is: are the articles just a shortcut to building a real site, or are they an integral part of a real site?
Writing and re-writing are essentially the same thing in the end, so if you’re worried about duplicate content, you might as well just get a couple books from the library, do some research and start writing. At least it’ll be fresh content.
Until some scraper comes along…