If it is not already the case, I believe that in the future article marketing will become more important -- but only by getting your articles published at relevant authority web sites. I see these article farms as having short life spans, perhaps a few more years.
I agree, distribute your articles umong the big ones only. and at a much redused rate, mass article submissions isnt going to work anymore. Surely with all these articles getting submitteed to the 100s of article directories (all with exactly the same content). wont google see that as duplicate content??/
It is duplicate content, there is no denying that. Google will simply filter some of the article sites from the serps for certain queries.
I think unique content is more important than getting links from link farms - ehm, article farms I mean. Keep in minds that sites like PRWeb are no longer passing PR (Page Rank) through to sites due to the spammers submitting a press release even when they leave the desk to go pee. Same thing will happen to all those article sites. Niche article farms might eventually be able to bypass that filter. Christoph
Unique content is important, of course, but nobody will ever find it if you don't also have some decent backlinks. What I do is write 2 versions of my articles, one for posting on my site and one to submit to the article directories. That way my site always has original content and I still get backlinks via article distribution. The real value of writing articles is getting them picked up by other content sites, not just article banks. If you write good quality articles on current hot topics, you can get some decent links that way.