So this is my question... I have about 20 articles that I have published on article websites. I would also like to put the content of the articles in my actual website. Would this hurt me because of the duplicate content? Would I be better off, or worse off if I did this?
You would of been better if the content was crawled first via your actual website, if you re-display it, your site will look like the one copying content. I always recommend before publishing an article to other sites that it be crawled via your website and a 1 month wait. This is just what I do and may not reflect other methods of other webmasters.
I would try to steer clear from that. Try to make your content unique on your site. Who's to say if Google changes its algorithms to really penalize sites with duplicate content. Good idea just not to do it.
Agreed. You should maybe re-write the content somewhat, and then re-post it. Make sure it's enough that it's unique.