"Duplicate" content

@Bennyb, yes getting PR on duplicate content is certainly doable, are you moving up the serps and getting first page or first position for dupe content?

My experience has been that I can seem to get away with SOME duplicate content and it doesn't seem to have a big effect. I had a dentist client and we used the exact same site with the exact same information on it except the domain name and geo-targeted keywords changed. The first 3 sites all ranked well for each of their geo-targeted keywords. So... I put up 12 of these sites... and 9 of them disappeared!!! We went back and re-wrote them, with the same basic information but a pretty good rewrite, and all of them came back within a few weeks.

So, from that one small experience I have come to believe that there is a certain amount of duplicate content that google will accept, but once the threshold is triggered, there could be trouble!

I'm assuming the threshold is different for age of domain, niche, keywords, etc... but I do believe there is a duplicate content "filter", if not a penalty.

Rewrite the text and use your own pictures then you have nothing to worry with SE's and copyright

You really won't have anything to worry about in your situation. Even if you are copying someone else's content word for word, I've seen the copier websites well outrank the original source. If you get "penalized" in the serps it is not because of duplicate content it's due to other factors, such as number of incoming links / authority of those links.

you wanna make sure that if you are rewritting articles that you do it to be at least 80% unique, duplicate content is just wasting your time..

I just don't buy it, why would a duplicate content article rank higher than an original? It just doesn't make sense.

If there was no duplicate content penalty then we could all just copy and paste articles, sales pages and spend all our time backlinking.

In my testing duplicate articles will not pack much of a punch when it comes to link power, nowhere near as much as an original one.

To the guy who said he has a duplicate content autoblog that is pr3, this means nothing. Content has nothing to do with your pagerank.

I have done some small experiments with a couple blogs, one had 100 posts that were spun (albeit with a crapish spinner). After a few months of posting these articles and doing some backlinking I am receiving around 2 hits a day.

I have a legit whitehat blog with around 50 original hand written posts and some backlinking. I am receiving around 200 hits a day and ranking for keywords that I have never backlinked on. If i write an article on a low competition keyword I can rank in the top 10 without having to do any backlinking at all for it.

Just my 2 cents.

I agree that Duplicate content is somewhat of a myth. I have autoblogs that are made up of duplicated content but they continued to rank when I last checked.