ok... so I submitted some artilces to a couple of sites last week... and my article (on the article site) is #2 for one of the keywords I am targeting... how come my site isn't even within the search results for the same keyword??? I mean I guess its good to have my article up there at #2 (of course it has a link to my site within it)... but I feel like my site is competing for the keyword now! From now on I am making seperate articles to submit to other sites and to post up on my site... but still how could my article get the #2 spot and my site is not even there at all!?
How old is your website? This usually happens if your website is still in the sandbox. It also depends on that site, how popular that site is and how much weight the search engines give to it. While my website was in the sandbox, other websites linking to mine would appear on top for my keywords...because of the anchor text they were linking to me from...
I thought the sandbox was for old sites... my site is brand new... I guess I should read up on sandbox!
There is more to it than just the age of your site. First of all, as you already noticed you should write different versions of the same article. But even then, I would not submit an article to one of the engines before Google has cached it from my site. So if the Google algo chooses to punish someone for duplicate content its not you!!! Secondly the reputation (and yes, here age plays a role) of the website is also important. Age, Pagerank, Links .... Make sure you give your articles some time to mature and point a couple of links there. Then submit them to other sites. Even if you rewrite it, there is still enough similarity.
Your site may be in the sandbox if your targeting competitive terms on a new website, presumably the article site is older, was spidered first and now ranks for your articles keywords, it would be unlikely that you r site would challenge it in the near future.