Duplicate Articles - what Google says versus experience

[luke175]

So I recently read an interview with Matt Cutts where he said in cases of duplicate content/content syndication that Google can recognize the "authority" article by links.

For example, if MSN publishes an article and multiple sites copy and paste that article and link back to MSN at the end, then Google will recognize via the links that MSN "owns" that article.

But in practice I wonder if this is a realty for most. For example, if I have a blog and I decide to syndicate some of the articles on it and include a link back to the blog in them...Google is saying they will recognize that my blog is the authority.

Any experiences with syndication like this and its effects on ranking?

For example, if I submit a blog post to <a major article site> as content, I feel pretty sure that the major site's content will rank and mine will disappear...even though the backlink should verify that my blog is the "owner" of the content.

Thoughts?

[edited by: tedster at 8:32 pm (utc) on Mar. 16, 2008]
[edit reason] removed specifics [/edit]

[tedster]

It still works both ways - but I've seen Google getting better at favoring the original source in recent times.

[freelistfool]

My experience is the trust rank of the site plays a big role in determining who owns the duplicate content.

I have one site that is mostly affiliate data (duplicate content) and as a result has a low trust rank. However, it has some original content. One of the original content pages caught fire and got a lot of back links. I gave another site permission to duplicate the content if they would link back to the page. The other site is now indexed for my content even though it points to the original content via a link.

I have another site that is all original content and has a decent trust rank. I allowed another site to republish a page from this site and my site still ranks well for the content.

Bottom line, don't syndicate content from low trust rank sites. Or even better, don't put any original content on low trust rank sites.

[netchicken1]

However, I have had recent experiences where I have summerised an article and linked back to it for the full version, and my post on the topic ranks higher than the authority post.

This is against big name publishers as well.

[tedster]

...don't syndicate content from low trust rank sites.

Just wondering here - as the backlink from the syndicated version starts to age, has anyone seen the ranking situation turn around?