Duplicate content?

This may be a stupid question, but does google penalize for duplicate content when the same article is on two different websites? Or do they just penalize for posting the same article on the same site over and over again? Thanks

They enalize for posting the same article on the same site over and over again.

Opinions differ, my experience is the you will not get penalized for using duplicate content from another site, but Google will only index duplicate content within the same site once. So if you have the same page 5 times on one site, it will only show in the Google index once. I have one particular site ranking page 1 result 1 for a couple of competitive keywords and the site uses nothing but duplicate content, its been running for more than three years. It also has more than 6,000 pages indexed in Google.

Plus the original site that posted the article will get preference in the serps if there are too many versions of the same article.

Your version could suddenly get a penalty if there become too many versions

The biggest news sites all have content that is on another news site, I think the duplicate content penalty is a myth.