Quick question; hope I am in the right place... With an article directory, how do you avoid getting penalized for duplicate content? Obviously there is a way to do this, right? Please advise!
There isn't really a way. Unless you just run a script to change the wording of your articles slightly.
If you get the articles first before they are distributed then you want them spidered and cached on your website before allowing public re-distribution of them.
The problem is that only about 20 article sites have enough trustrank/PR to get pages indexed quickly.
You could submit articles manually, each time changine the code slightly. "manually" doing things is always better. But at the same time could be tedious.