dataguy - 1:41 pm on Oct 28, 2009 (gmt 0)

Does Google understand that this being UGC, discount it as duplicate and move on?

They almost certainly do. We can spot the copied articles on our site by looking at lack of referrals from Google and comparing it to other articles in the same niche.

My advice is to create an algo that dumps articles every so often which receive little or no traffic, this will effectively eliminate the problem before it turns into a penalty by keeping the ratio of copied content to unique content low

[edited by: dataguy at 2:10 pm (utc) on Oct. 28, 2009]