A lot of SEOs will create one article, post it on their money site and then blast the same article out to social properties to get links back to their money site.
The controversy is over the duplicate content this creates since you are syndicating the original article.
The Test is: The Duplicate content to Social Media - what impact does this have on your rankings?
The idea of this test is to see if posting duplicate content that could conceivably come from a program such as IFTTT or Jetpack or Syndwire or Onlywire or even manual posting is problematic or beneficial.
If this proves to be beneficial, then we would recommend using this method to create links back to your site. If it sends our test page down in our controlled environment, then we will know NOT to use them at all! We have the answer.
Test Downloads
Transcription Below
What we did in this test is to replicate various standard practices - when someone has a blog post and they post it in their site, through IFTTT, Jetpack, Syndwire, Onlywire, and to social media (FB, twitter).
The idea is, does that provide benefit?
Generally speaking, what happens in this automated thing is, a small little blurb is grabbed and there is a link back.
We found that these links in of themselves, are not enough to move the needle.
In the test, we could see that we fired them both.
We did a multi-field test and we fired in the middle - the #2 spot.
The reason that we did that is it gives us the opportunity to see if the site moves up, stays the same, or moves down.
In this situation, the links didn't do anything to move a site.
Does that mean it is a waste of time?
Not necessarily, because these type of links are part of a natural looking profile and you might actually get traffic to your site from them.
It is not necessarily something that you should stop doing because it is a complete waste of time but if you have been told that you should do it because you will get crazy value out of it, that is not the case.