Many people are concerned about penalized for duplicate content by submitting the same article to multiple directories. But this fear doesn't seem to make any sense. If you're submitting an article hoping that it would reprinted on many websites, why would you be concerned about submitting it to multiple directories. The search engines should take this into account....at least for articles.
When submitting an article to directories you are not looking for people to duplicate your content and reprint it. You are looking for people to LINK to your article or better yet link back to your website referenced in the article.
Well that is what you think and we also want But reality is that, too many article sites having the same content, what good does it do to the internet community, it is just JUNK, without any use or fresh or new ideas in articles, it is same all over. The primary motive of search engines is to provide the web visitors with related content and new content for that matter and not to show the same content over and over again, so what do they do, they will take the article which they think is the best out of all the same 100's of copies and de-index others over a period of time. So it is not about duplicate content, it is all about maintaining a quality standard over the internet and reducing the 'content junk'.
I totally agree with you. By the terms of service, the article directories are going to open up your article to people who would like to syndicate them on their own websites. There is no such thing called duplicate content penalty. At best what would happen is that duplicate content gets ignored by the search engines if they detect it.
I think I may be going mad as you and Aff marketer make much more sense than the OP does but may be I am misreading or the OP didn't completely quite say what was meant?
Although submitting to a single directory is enough but people may want to sure by submitting to multiple directories.