Article submission question

Question

I have been participating in quite a few forums lately and I have learned that lots of people are concerned about "duplicate content".

Many say that if you intend to use articles to promote your site or blog you shouldn't submit them to more than one article directory. Others say that it doesn't matter; that you will suffer no "dupe content penalty" by sending the same article to many sites, so you should keep doing that.

I do find this a bit confusing, and I would appreciate feedback. What are your thoughts on this? Should you send your article to many article directories, or just one?

Answer 1

As far as I know, there is really no such thing as penalizing by the big G. Your original articles on your blog will just be left behind, especially if the article directory are submitting to is a powerful one. But if you will use an attractive signature on such directories, you can still get traffic to your blog.

Answer 2

I have heard that it does matter. Google will only count one of those submissions and the rest will be considered duplicates.

Answer 3

It seems to me from the Google webmaster article linked by Guardianangel that the worst that happens is that the duplicates just don't get shown in those results. But of course they are still getting seen by people who look at the article directories they're on, as well as the sites that have published them. I assume the backlinks still help a little too for SEO.

I think that if there was any real problem in submitting to many directories, then you wouldn't submit to even one of them. The whole point of doing that is for your article to be duplicated at many other locations, after all.