Duplicate Content question

[mmmwowmmm]

Here's my situation: I just started a site, it hasn't been indexed by G yet, but I've been advertising. Someone submitted an article about Christmas for me to post on the site. It's about 700 words. He also submitted it to another "blog" type site, which published it and now it shows up in the google serps.

I would like to publish the article to my site (it's pretty good). If I do, can I be penalized for dup content? And if so, would it be the whole site, or just the page the article appears on.

I'm worried that the first time G indexes my site they will see dup content and will sandbox me forever or something. Anyone have an idea about how this works? I've looked up other posts, and people beliefs about dup content seem to be all over the place.

Thanks

[tedster]

No one can predict what Google will do with 100% certainty. But if your site has substantial unique content, then one duplicate page will not hurt your site overall - the most common scenario, as I understand it, is that the single dupe page gets ignored.

See this related thread:
[webmasterworld.com...]