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Google says there is no "duplicate content penalty"

Some of you may remember me being very concerned with a client who have developed a site which had LOADS of duplicate pages. Now, my main concern was a "duplicate content penalty". I very carefully picked the best version and blocked all the other pages which were duplicated. Today i read this:
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/09/demystifying-duplicate-content-penalty.html

So, duplicate content is still bad but as far as a penalty goes... it doesnt exist? The penalty comes when your duplicate page is put in the supplemental. So is this article saying that i can pinch content from somewhere else - add to it - and that page will be the chosen version of that content?

Any thoughts?

Not exactly...Lats night I have added some article to my blog from article site and I got this blog indexed by Google...

i always doing it smart ,i duplicated and make some adjustment , it save and smart. 

Hi Matt,
Interesting post which has given me some food for thought ...

I usually create content sites containing 100% unique articles. The sites have a very simple homepage with a basic navigation structure linking to the individual internal pages of my site.

Now, let's assume that I create a new website with a totally unique homepage containing some good useful content. Next, I get a heap of articles from an article directory and upload those articles to individual pages on my site. The homepage links to each one of these pages, and with each page containing essentially duplicate content taken from an article directory.

Finally, I optimise my homepage for some specific keywords, and start getting links to my site (to my homepage) based on those specific keywords.

Now what would happen in this scenario?

Would my site get indexed in Google - I'm pretty certain it would. However, would any of the internal pages of the site containing the duplicate content, get indexed? I'm not sure .... And would my site get penalised for using all this duplicate content? Again, I would expect that to be the case.

I'd be interested to hear what you guys think.
Cheers,
Tony

Hey Matt,
Things are pretty good - just planning on launching another site soon

Thanks for clarifying what would happen to the pages containing duplicate content ... And you're right about inconsistencies as I have sites which contain duplicate content (they were AdSense sites I purchased some time back and I'm pretty certain that the sames sites were sold to quite a few people) which rank on page one for certain keywords (e.g. the Concrete Stain site in my sig is a perfect example).

Not sure about how the in-bound links from sites with duplicate pages would impact a site....

As you know a great strategy for getting one-way backlinks to a site is submitting articles to article directories. So what happens when I submit the same article containing a link to my main site, to hundreds of article directories. Does my main site get penalised in any way for having inbound links from all these articles containing duplicate content? Or perhaps these inbound links are discounted and my site gets ranked for its own original content alone as you mentioned.

The thing is, submitting articles is a proven strategy of getting back-links to a site and improving your SERPs which suggests that the duplicate content penalty perhaps only applies if you have duplicate content on your own site (i.e. multiple pages having the same content on your site) and not neccessarily linking back to your site from sites containing duplicate content.

Kind regards,
Tony

That's pretty much what I've been doing with my own content sites - unique content all the way. Obviously it is a lot of work so always looking at ways to speed up and refine the process ...

Cheers,
Tony