Article Submission and the Duplicate Content Issue
Over the course of the last year or so, a great paranoia has arisen over the fear of how the Article Submission of one article to too many places will cause Google to penalize you with their infamous "Google Slap." They attribute this to the duplicate content issue. But is that what it really is?
According to Google, duplicate content happens when you publish the same text on every page of a single site in order to trick the spiders into thinking its extremely relevant.
Period!
This is the only reference Google makes to duplicate content. They don't want to catch you placing page after page of the same content on your site. Nothing more, nothing less.
Submitting the same article to the 1,300+ article directories wouldn't be considered duplicate content then. Rather, having your content posted on all these sites would be considered "link popularity" and would increase the value of that content.
Think of it this way . . .
Each time your article is posted on a directory, Google considers that a yes vote. So having several hundred directories all saying yes to your one article is far better than having several hundred "spun" articles all getting one yes vote from the one directory it shows up on.
Sure, having a thousand spun articles (if they're spun significantly enough) will give you that many back links. But the power behind them is the power of one. Having one well written article posted to a thousand directories will also give you a thousand back links, but the power behind that one article is multiplied and compounded by each site its on.
So as you can see, duplicate content and article submission really have nothing to do with each other. The whole issue sure sold a lot of article spinners though!