Search ranking and duplicate articles

[snowfore]

Hi,

I run a widgets website and regularly receive offers and contributions of editorial content from writers and people who are into the widgets industry.

I was wondering if boosting the text content of relevent articles on my site will improve my search status. Clearly one would expect so, since there are more words and content to be indexed.

However, if some of the articles that are submitted to me for publication appear elsewhere on the web on other websites, e.g. that of the author would having them on my site be a NEGATIVE thing?

Does linking back to the original site further increase the negative weighting?

Or maybe, it is a good thing? I'd be intersted to hear what the forum thinks?

Cheers

Nick

[edited by: Robert_Charlton at 4:56 pm (utc) on Feb. 1, 2008]
[edit reason] removed specifics [/edit]

[tedster]

I can see how re-publishing an article that appears elsewhere on the web might not give a site the same positive effect that a unique article would be, but I'm not sure how it could be a negative. Unless you have nothing BUT re-published articles - that might raise a flag of some kind.

Concidentally, Matt Cutts published a few comments about this area just today: [mattcutts.com...]