Duplicate content on newswebsites

Let's see if you guys can shed a bit of light on this subject. I have seen news-related websites that do nothing but copy/paste viral and quality content from websites in their niche, yet maintain a good position in the SERP. I thought google penalizes non-unique content? Also how does that work with plagiarism, they do link back to the websites they took the articles from.

google will show you the nearest source for your search query

basically if you live in chicago and both the tribune and ny times have the same content, it will show you the chicago tribune first

Duplicate content = same content on multiple pages of your 1 single website
Syndicated content = content copied and pasted from one site to another..

While I know duplicate content is supposed to be penalised, I'm not sure about the other one..

Anyway for the past year I was ranking a website in top 5 for main keyword and there were about 2000 pages (products) and 3-4 different descriptions only, so loads of duplicate content

GiorgioB said:

Duplicate content = same content on multiple pages of your 1 single website
Syndicated content = content copied and pasted from one site to another..

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I did not know this, thanks. I was just wondering because everyone is preaching unique content, but I see a lot of websites using only syndicated content.

Qyntius said:

I did not know this, thanks. I was just wondering because everyone is preaching unique content, but I see a lot of websites using only syndicated content.

Click to expand...

Those guys are talking about unique content on one particular website. Google could not possibly penalize for duplicate
news across several websites since everyone covers the same story.

RSS news feeds are ok with gog if the tie into your content.