martinibuster - 4:34 pm on Sep 18, 2012 (gmt 0)

With the duplicate content thing, wouldn't google pick one as the original and give more PR to that one?

Google doesn't give PR, not exactly. I understand it as something that is earned and flowed from other sites. PageRank is actually a number of things and I won't pretend to know everything that comprises it. But in simple terms, PageRank can be thought of as relating to the links into a site which helps Google make various determinations about a web page, particularly in this case the authority of the web page. So even though a web page may contain duplicate content it might actually be more authoritative in the sense of the amount and quality of links.

The point I'm trying to make is that the depreciation of a web page's ability to rank for phrases because of duplicate content is a different scenario from the depreciation of an outbound link because of the quality, authority or relevance of the originating site on which the link is hosted. Two different things happening. One is an apple, the other an orange.

I could be wrong, but my experience is that Google is relying on the inbound link profile to identify the web page's authority (as I described above) and letting that link authority profile and the separate considerations for relevance decide the fate of the outbound link.