Using other peoples articles on my site

Up to this point every article on my site was written by me. Is there any benefit to putting articles by other people on my site. Do I need to provide them a link to authors sites if I use there articles. If so does that decrease the value of the page as far as ranking, link, building and traffic goes.

Well we have articles on our site that were written by other people and they still rank well in google and yahoo for the key term the article is about so I don't necessarily think it is a bad thing if it is a topic you don't think you can write yourself. I always provide a link back to people because I can't stand when I put an article out there and someone doesn't link back to me. But I think if you can write it yourself I would just do that.

Google Webmaster guidelines say that they love unique content which is in contradiction of putting other people's articles on your site, but maybe it is not such a bad thing, only it is better to have your own original articles.

If you are using them with pointing their link then there will be problem in my opinion. it denotes that you are not copied the content from other sites otherwise your site will get penalized due to duplicate content.

Simply put, if you use someone elses work, you must site the source. If you find a great article written about your niche, just make sure you give proper credit to the author.

Perhaps you can write your own article by piecing together advice from others. Take a little from 4 different articles and put it into your own, creative words.

100% agree with Lb1878.....rather than copy and paste someone else's article, review it. talk about highlights, problems, praises, criticisms, etc. Not only will you have interesting UNIQUE material for your readers, google will not suspect duplicate content.