If I write and article and submit it to 50 or more article directories, will I really be punished for duplicate content if the article is exactly the same in each directory? I ask because what if I post one article to one directory and a bunch of people find it useful and post the same article on their blog...am I still going to be punished for dup content? Even when I have no control over what people do with my free article once it's published somewhere. With information flying all over the internet, I can't see how the search engines can punish you for this. Anyone have comments on this? Thanks..
My understanding of duplicate content penalty is affecting you if you have the same content on your own site. I write and publish articles, but never publish an article I have on my own site.
You can duplicate content. About.com and Wikkipedia.com share duplicate content. So do blogs. I think it is ok to some degree.
if you write an article and submit it to 500 directories, google will filter or ignore most of them. try to focus 1-5 of them
ya I agree all of them above. duplicate content are more of the same content on your own site web pages. this would be penalized because it could be used to target different keyword phrase on a similar content. for similar content on different site such as the same article on article directories google could put a filter. maybe they would only count backlink for the first 100 site that has the highest PR while the rest won't pass the link juice. but unfortunately we don't know what is the limit. it could be 50, 100 or any numbers.
Publish your article on your website first. After it has been found by the se spiders then you can submit a slightly different version to the article directories.