Here is the scenario: 1. I have an article. 2. I create a new page on my site and post my articles there. 3. I wait until it is indexed on at least 1 of the major SE's. 4. I submit this article to an article website so I can market my site and get a few backlinks. The article website expects you to submit the entire article and not just a link to where the article is, I assume this is standard. This is duplicate content as I see it, or is this ok? do you do it?
This would be duplicate content since other sites will have the same article as your site. My advice, keep one article (unique) for your site and create a different one for distribution.
This subject has been discussed in numerous threads here. I would suggest that you do a search and read through some of them to get a lot of good information and advice on this topic. Unique content is one of your site's most valuable assets. You never want to submit content from your site to an article directory or allow it to be republished anywhere else online if you can help it. Submitting an article to a good article directory is an effective way to generate traffic to your site, but write up an article specifically for that purpose and be sure that it is completely unique from your site's actual content.
I think that nobody knows what google WILL treat as a unique content in feature. For now it is obvious (I've tried this myself), that if you will submit article to 100+ article sites and put the same article on your web-site, then you will still have visitors from google. It's hard to do a split testing and find out what the traffic would be if you wouldn't submit your content, but google will not ban your site now. More over, even if you submit a copy of your content, google will assign you a PR faster (for one of my sites it took 1 month to get PR4 for inner page). Back links mean more for google now. Does it mean that you should submit article and put a copy at your web-site? No, I don't think so. But if you will have an article, say, 700-words and will submit 500-words version of article to the article sites (with different title and description), then article at your web-site will be unique for google. What do you need to do? Depends on your budget, sure, as 8everything and kentuckyslone recommended, it is good idea to have unique content.
The best thing to do is create two versions of the article, one longer version to keep for your own site which covers the topics in depth, and a shorter one that is more of a summary that you can put on all of the free sites
What I do is I write an article, post that copy on my blog. I ping my blog. I have a free rewriting service that can generate unique, readable copies of my articles. I submit a unique copy to every directory I find. So I get the best of both worlds
It's duplicate content. Why not do this, 1> Write one article for your website which is very valuable. 2> write an other article, more of a teaser, which can be 60 - 70% rehashed stuff of the original article. Submit this article to major article directories. This should be more worthwhile ~G
This approach is nothing but duplicate content. It has been argued that first index theory in dup content issues is a fallacy. If your article is picked up by a high PR site, with an older url and more backlinks, you may be declared the dupo content offender. You can put a different version of the article on the directories and still get your links in them. Aside, losing ranking in SEs, dup content can send your pages to supplementary results - the area every webmster dreads.