I see some websites where they have a blog like news section. I'm positive they merely copied and pasted the content on. But because they have been doing this for many years, they generate thousands of pages and many backlinks. I also noticed their blogs/news is usually in a subdomain. Would'd google penalize them for duplicate content? Any comments welcomed.
Are you sure your just not seeing the categories of their blog? Such as, my blog as about 6 categories - if an article is on the home page, it will also be shown under the category it was posted under.
Not nessesarly... You also have to consider the fact the most news stories in the overall news media gets researched and confirmed from only a few very large networks and they are the ones who provide the content for news articles.
That makes sense... In another thread I made a point about people re-visiting sites for the unique content. The same could be said about how search engines work.
That's right unique content is the best, but you still give value of you gather relevant content at one place. So they don't penalize that.