Using published articles as seed content

Will it kill my new site?

[hdpt00]

I am in the process of starting a large site and I can only afford about 200 articles / month to be written so it is going a bit slower than expected. I've been thinking of using some article sites (where the authors give you permission if you keep their copyright) to seed my new site with content so it doesn't look sparse to visitors.

Now is there any harm in this in that it is duplicate content? I have heard google can somehow distinguish articles and not penalize you; however, this is sometimes hard to believe. Should I only use original content for my new site or do you think it'll be fine to start with the duplicate content and as I get more articles written, slowly replace the old content with the new? Or is it simply fine to just keep the old and add the new.

Any advice would be good as I don't want to tick of Gbot. Thanks!

[hdpt00]

Does anyone know if this might severely hurt me or the original articles I add?

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[RobinK]

We have used sites like that for articles. We do that to benefit our visitors. While the majority of content is our own, I have seen no problems from the search engines on the other articles. If you are worried about it you could add more content to that particular page (without changing the article of course) so the page is not a carbon copy of another one.

You can also search each article and see just how many times it appears in the serps.

[instinct]

It's fine to re-use the articles. However on any page that is a duplicate make sure you have the robots/noindex meta.

The robots will then not index the page contents and you will therefore not incur a duplicate penalty.

That means you can use the articles to have more content on your site for visitors - but you can't use it as search engine 'food'.