Is it duplicate content if you take a site down before republishing elsewhere?

[Quentin]

So lets say you have an article written on a free blogger platform such as wordpress.com, weebly, hubpages, or squidoo. The content in question is your content, but you want to republish it for some reason some time after you put it online. For example you buy a domain name and create a self hosted wordpress.org site after toying with free publishing for a bit. Obviously you want your information on the domain name you paid for that has more potential to rank, but you might want to make a few edits without completely spinning or rewriting the article since you already put in the work. How would you go about doing this without being flagged as duplicate content and hurting ranking. Would you be able to copy the content onto a word file, knock down the free site, then republish onto your new host, or is the content archived as already online.

[Jake]

There is probably some overlap time while the cashed copy of the old site is still around. The most common strategy involves using a 301 permanent redirect to signal the search engine that the site has been relocated, re-rout traffic as well as link juice to the new site.

I have to guess that even if you remove the original site after the new one is up that the new one will still get top priority after the old one is removed (Have you checked if anyone else has already duplicated your stuff?)

[gruntmaster9000]

Have you got Google Webmaster Tools? It might help.