Sindycated Content results to Duplicate Content

Simply said: I don't know.

I can tell you what I do know:

- Press release links bring zero SEO benefit, could this be cause it's the same press release syndicated all over the place and often picked up by scraper sites to make it even worse?

- Could it be cause it would be pretty cheap for us and thus easier to game Google and thus Google would put a limit on the juice flowing from it?

Anyway, this are just doubts, that do make it appear like using the same piece of content over and over is bad but I have never really tested it.

I avoid using the same piece of content at all costs but the main (and perhaps only?) reason for me is to avoid footprints all over my network.

The fact that people started to use spin content could be another indication that using the same piece of content is bad, though I think using spun content is even worse then using the same piece of content and I would never take a single piece of advice from people that use spun content, even less the people who created these softwares that allow for it.

If your backlink profile consists of 1000 links and every link comes from somewhere else and it's surrounded by the exact same piece of content then that can never look natural of course so I'm pretty sure Google puts some limit on it or has a function in it's algorithm that devalues all the links together.

Uploading the same piece of content to a handful of doc sharing sites doesn't look too unnatural to me, and it's not like those public sites pass much juice anyway so even less to worry about so I think you're perfectly fine by doing it.

Oh something to add which strengthens the point and gives a good reason to not use the same type of content is the ability of the page to rank, like the above poster said, Google prefers to rank only 1 page when there are multiple of the same pages, and a link from a page that ranks for the keyword that you aim to rank for is stronger then a link from a page that doesn't rank at all for your keyword, FACT.

So by uploading it to multiple sites you're kind of wasting your time, unless you just want more IP diversity / links from different subnets, which also has to do with rankings, FACT.

Conclusion: If you plan to build links to those PDF's and rank each of them make sure to use unique content for each of them (not a crappy spun version), if you don't care about getting them ranked then use it just once or a few times in case you like to boost the number of referring domains and thus C-subnets linking to you (small benefit).