What's better for SEO, a unique article on your website....

Well DUH. That's the whole point behind how. How else would the distributed article get backlinks (as said in the poll)? You'd have to include a link.

 

exactly. traffic doesn't fall out of the sky and all of the sudden webmasters and visitors just magically appear. your content has to be somewhere for G! to know it even exists. if you're gonna do that, just re-write the article though and itll be ok.

 

First there is no penalty... What happens it the article gets ignored more or less. Not so much ignored but the search engines rank it lower the more and more the article is duplicated.

I'm going to have to really disagree with "most every decent article on the internet, has been reposted somewhere" this is about as false as a statement as one can make. I know many major sites that spend a lot of time making sure this DOESN'T happen. Legally you can not do this, ever here of copyright? I have seen sites get completely banned from google for this and have seen adsense accounts suspended. No real site is going to let this happen.

 

The SEs rank what lower? The duplicate copies, or the original article?

That still doesn't stop people from reposting them on forums and other places. It happens all the time. Especially news articles.

Question however, you have seen sites get banned from Google for what? Copying other people's articles? What if it's on your forums and your people are posting it? I see that constantly.

I'm not talking about people stealing your article and putting it on their website, I'm speaking mostly about on forums and other places where the users of the site repost the article.

 

All the above... You see this more with article directories and someone thinking they can get easy backlinks by posting to a bunch of article directories. With a news story it really gets offset since the people talk about the story and link back to the site.

News articles are a different beast since they are meant to create a buzz and get people to talk about it. Most online news places allow this and even have RSS feeds for the news articles. With this said its still not legal unless the news website states this. Granted CNN is not going to come after digitalpoint for a forum post, but it would have rights if it wanted.

And yes I have seen people file DMCA paper work:
http://www.google.com/dmca.html

With google and watched an entire site vanish from google. This of course is extreme but if your taking articles from a site without permission it can happen. Its really up to the author and site how far they choose to take it.

 

Since the threadstarter is talking about SERPs, then I believe that submitting to numerous article directories and having the relevant anchor text will give a better result in SERPs than having that content on your site.

 

So your article is on one hundred sites with one hundred links, but the links hold no weight since this is just duplicate content. The traffic you get from these links is minimal since they are just a bunch of free article directories that no one looks at and its totally unrelated to your site..... Sorry I don't see the benefit.

It may have been a good idea 2 years ago, but not so much now. Keep the content on your own page.

 

Huh? You should submit the article to a related category in the article directory. Not one that is unrelated.

I am no expert, but even if the pages are deemed supplemental by Google, doesn't mean they don't rank. They do rank and the links with the proper anchor text will help in SERPs. Content on your own page is good, but inbound links will help even more. Well, in my opinion anyway.

 

Many tests have been done to prove that article directories don't help anymore... As an owner of one I would have to agree. The problem is there is so much "unrelated" content with backlinks the SE pay little attention to them. If you get that same article on a related website with a decent amount of traffic, its a hundred time better for serps.

 

Unique article on my site of course...and then create some other articles that can be submitted on article directories to increase backlinks and might bring you traffic...

 

so I should put the article on my site first then send it out?

 

I don't think anyone is able to give a definitive answer on this issue.

Something I've done before is take an old blog post, of mine, and then package it up and submit it as an article.

Basically, if the page has been around long enough you'll know whether it ranked well enough for anything and/or brought you any traffic. If it didn't rank and bring in traffic, why not send it out into the world and see if it will at least garner you some backlinks?

Besides, blog posts usually "age" out of the SERPs pretty quickly anyway.