In this case a news blog that simply copies other sites news and links to them. Can you be penalized by Google for having an outgoing text link on that site? How about the other search engines? On a seperate note, if this site has no page rank and is more than a year old can you can assume this is because it is considered duplicate content? thanks
I wouldn't be surprised if the answer was yes. Google wants to reward you for creating content yourself, not simply clone another website.
As far as I look around to many sites, the content is not always original, but the site is very high in SERPs. For instance, many websites about mobile phone have word-to-word copied specification from Manufacturiers, and nothing happens. No penalty, they are ranked higher in SERPs than the sites with modified spec. I'm really confused what is "duplicated content penalty". Can anyone specify more details?
I don't think there is a duplicate filter, or you have to be real blatent to set it off. I submit articles and several of the reprints end up with PR for the same article that is on a buch of other sites. I also have pages that are similar except for region and they do not seem to be under any kind of a penalty.
I think duplicate content penalty applies only if content is located on different sites. This is because google rarely shows multiple pages from the same site in results.