Thanks Dave - if you ever need me in the future please don't hesitate to contact me, as a smaller company I have few overheads and therefore am of a lower price than the competition
I see you have had a lot of responses to your query - everyone has different points of views and that's why forums are so great!
News posts: every 4 hours
NIck, Do some testing, turn off the news feed things and see if it makes any difference. It's not traffic that matters; only conversions. If those visitors are looking at the news feeds and bouncing off then they aren't much use to you.
Richard, Google won't push your ranking down, it will just ignore the duplicate content. On trhe other hand if all you do is regurgitate a mass of news feeds then google may take exception and depress the wehole site (because it's not adding value).
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I disagree - I have seen sites penalised for duplicate content so I would agree with Richard on this one.
Google will not punish your site for publishing content found elsewhere. All google will do is ignore the content....it seemed (to me at least) that duplicate content is now a punishable offence in Google's eyes.
If google was going to punish duplicate content half the news sites in the world would has perished years ago.