Duplicate Content Penalty by Google on Blog Site?

Is it duplicated internal URL's or dupe content cuz of republishing?

[adfree]

My major site tanked to under 10% of traffic in G.

It runs on an online content management system and uses forums, blogs and static formats in euqal ratio for the various different topics.

The content is 90% unique to an industrial/B2B topic but re-publishes some on-topic articles with permission of the original authors or by themselves.

Some of those are close to 1:1 copies with all references to their sites with credentials etc. as of mutual agreements.

Now, weeks ago the whole site tanked and I guessed it was due to these articles. 50% of those are found by Google at the original site AND mine (whereas the original site is always listed atop).

If that wasn't enough I discovered something else which might also apply to all my blog content at that site:

In G I search for:
"article copy, couple of words"

SERPS:
origin.com/article-blabla
widgets.com/date_xx-xx-#*$!x/article-bla
widgets.com/display/article-bla/key?bla?date_xx-xx-#*$!x/article-bla
widgets.com/display/article-bla/key?bla?other-string
widgets.com/display/article-bla/key?bla?another-string

Obviously my blog system duplicates content internally depending where it pushes the article (categories, archives, etc.). They would be indexed in the /display/ container.

Question 1:
Am I being penalized for republish some articles?

Question 2:
Am I being penalized for my blog duplicating URLs with same content?

Question 3:
If yes to the above, is this true for the republished articles or also for all my own content?

Final:
I disallowed via robots.txt the /display/ container entirely. My traffic was back within two days. Well, this could have been with the discussed October Update cuz it was three days ago, who knows.

But IF in fact that was the key to prevent any sort of penalty, I would blog all interactive content (e.g. all user contributions) as these are found in the /display/ container as well.

Sorry, this is a handfull but I am totall clueless here.

Thanks!

[irldonalb]

Opinion - I don't think so. Otherwise 95% of blogs would be banned. I think Google recognises how blogs are set up. You can access the same content several ways.

Fact - I'm not sure.

[JoeHouse]

I have a question about whether or not this is considered dup content.

Lets say you write an article and post it on a single article directory that has lots of traffic etc....

Then lets say you post this same article on your website.

Seeing that you are the original owner of this article and it shows that in the resource box, would google consider this dup content?

Will google recognize the fact that the url in the resource box are one in the same therefore is not dup content? Or does google still consider it dup content?

[ecmedia]

These problems that you mention are there on millions of websites and some that I run too - the penalty you have is for something else.

[Quadrille]

"Seeing that you are the original owner of this article and it shows that in the resource box, would google consider this dup content?"

If it's the same as the content on another page, then it IS duplicate content. Google (and other SEs) cannot investigate the ownership of every item on the web; they merely recognise two editions of one piece of content. And delist one of them - there may be an algorithmic selection process, but it really might as well be a random choice of which to list, which to drop.

Duplicate issues in Google are page by page; ie if there's duplication, a page will either be listed or not - there are NO site-wide consequences to unduplicated pages.

So if a blog has 'tanked' - duplication is not the issue, though it may have affected certain pages.