The truth of the Google duplicate content penalty is quite simply that there is none! If that confuses you, then you have been reading too many misinformed forums or blogs where people get stuck on some popular term that they have no idea what it means, and then profess to be experts.

Hey vaalion,

No, you're absolutely right about article syndication; in the majority your articles don't get distributed to sites with any real value.

That's why I recommend that instead of just using services like Unique Article Wizard (services that syndicate your content at the click of a button) you also look to get your posts on high profile sites.

For instance, look at this article I wrote.

Can you see how many references Google has of it? All I did to get that many references was to submit to a high profile site, something like sitepronews.com. If it's a high quality article, they'll published it, and as a result other publishers pick it up and put it on their site.

It's a simple case of provide value, and get value in return. You'll never get rich by syndicating spun stuff to poor quality sites. Having said that, sometimes using services like these can be good for backlinks (and for backlinks duplicate content is fine).

Many will find my thoughts controversial, so over the next few months I'm doing a complete article marketing test of all these services to try and find out exactly how much traffic each service provides. It will include video marketing, article syndication, guest blogging, podcast submission, social bookmarking, directory article marketing, ezine article marketing and more....

That will provide the proof we're all looking for!

There is a definite difference; to understand why you need to take a look at the PageRank algorithm and understand how PageRank is calculated, dilutes and passed on between pages.

Whenever you get a backlink from a web page you'll get that direct link, but you'll also get a certain amount of the link juice from links that link to that the web page itself - ie. indirect links.

So, yes, to answer your question your technique of backlinking to your backlinks is really quite powerful. Especially if the page you're building backlinks to has a relatively small number of outbound "dilution" links.

In fact, it's a strategy used by many spammers. They'll put links on a bucket load of profile sites and load them up with backlinks, eventually pointing to their site - like a link wheel. A link structure like this makes it very hard for Google to detect and is what's known as a "burn and churn" method.

Long answer cut short - It will certainly help past PR down to your site. I'd be more inclined to try and find high profile article syndication sites, submit posts there and have them picked up and distributed over the web. That's exactly how this blog went from a PR0 to PR4 since starting out towards the end of January this year (two months).