Hello, I like to hear experts opinions about this. From my understanding, by publishing duplicated contents, the website would get punished for it. If that's the case how do article resource sites (that accept article submission and publish duplicated articles) still enjoy high page rank?
You won't be penalized if you have duplicate content. The issue there is plagiarism. What happens with duplicate content is that the page which has established itself and is more popular gets the ranking. The other one might be invisible, if not ranked much lower. Article resource sites rank high maybe because the whole site supports the whole theme about articles and so they established an authority site which influences their ranking.
PageRank is related to the number of links pointing at your site. Its nothing to do with the content of the site.
Is there a magic number of how many backlinks should trigger a sites higher SE ranking. I used a few PR scripts here on DP and found diferent counts for the major SE's with Google being in the middle and Yahoo being the most. Also how accurate is Google's Toolbar PR option?
I'm afraid there's no magic number. And rightly so. Otherwise, link scammers would rejoice on this sure-fire technique.
I have about 5-6 articles written by famous SEO experts on my website (obviously the articles are also published on their sites) and strangly they have higher PR (PR3) then rest of the site (PR2) I really can't understand the logic.