I have heard alot of negative stories about using article distribution service to build back link. Some say it will make Google to drop your listing while others say Google prefers it nice and slow. What am i suppose to believe?
If you submit articles to ezinearticles.com and maybe goarticles.com, you can get good results both in traffic and improving rankings. The key is to NOT submit articles that are a duplicate of articles on your site. If you write a post about Topic X then write a similar article about the same Topic X (maybe only from a slightly different angle or more general than the detailed post on your site) and then link to your post. If you want to submit to 2 different article submission sites, I prefer to write two additional articles about Topic X and submit a different article to each of the submission sites. These should each be unique and different from the post/article on your own site. I would link one submitted article to your post with the exact targeted keyword phrase as the link text. Then on the 2nd submitted article I would link with a slight variation of the targetted keyword phrase.
There is nothing bad that can happen from getting links from article marketing. The worst that can happen is the links from the same article would not be counted by Google. So to get the most out of article marketing, use different articles.
There's no such thing as duplicate content for google. So distributing articles will not lower your rank. It will likely increase your rank.