Hi All I have some great content on my website - www.driversdomainuk.com Now, if I publish some of the very content rich pages such as http://www.driversdomainuk.com/driver-psychology/mobile-phone-use/ Would Google see the article as as much value if it was a stand alone article on its own (i.e not on website), or as its an extract from a website it would be not as important... Basically is it "SEO Smart" to submit articles which are already on web sites..? Rob
Are you saying that you want to republish some content from your site on some specific article site? In that case, if it's published on your site first then your site gets the credit for it. Publishing it elsewhere afterwards won't harm you and will give you a bigger audience and give you the ability to get yourself some backlinks and attract traffic.
When your site is young and not well-established, I would recommend to never submit any content from that site to other sites. Why? If you publish on a site with less visibility (i.e. lower traffic, lower pagerank) than yours, you won't be gaining much. But if you publish on a site with more visibility, like EzineArticles, Buzzle, or a prominent blog in your subject area, the page on the more visible site will probably appear before yours in search rankings. This also can be an issue when joining blogging associations or other sites that repost content. For example, I joined blogcatalog.com, and found not only that some of the blog entries that it had pulled onto their site were ranking higher than my blog, but in some cases, google had indexed the copied page on blogcatalog, and hadn't indexed my original blog post. This troubled me, and I quickly deleted my listing from blogcatalog, which corrected the issue once the indexing updated. It was annoying, because I was actually gaining an appreciable number of new visits through blogcatalog, but, sometimes you need to exercise restraint and give up a good source of traffic if it's harming your site in other ways. When your site becomes prominent, this is less of an issue. Just how prominent? I'd say homepage pagerank of 3-4 is not good enough for this purpose. My sites are kind of on the cusp of this prominence. My homepage of most of my sites have higher pagerank than I could easily achieve on sites like EzineArticles, but if I publish a new article on the site and it's buried deeper in the site, it will typically not rank as well. It takes quite some time before your site will be visible enough to justify publishing duplicated content elsewhere. On the other hand, some blogs succeed by syndicating content freely and generously. If you do this, you would be wise to require a direct dofollow link back to your content. Unless, that is, your site is based on copyleft (like CC or GNU FDL), that's another issue. Those sites use a fundamentally different approach, and it's a valid and potentially very successful one. Because copyleft is viewed positively, people tend to be more generous about linking to copyleft sites. Sites which use this model often achieve much more success and prominence than one would think. Look at Wikipedia! It's completely copyleft and free, and it's the first search result in a number of very highly competitive search terms.
Quality articles would give you quality result whether you are posting on your site or you are posting for back link purposes. Try to use unique articles for each submission would give you good result as all of them would indexed faster in Google.
If you can give up some of your content for a good link, I say do it. Just make sure you're allowed to submit duplicate content to the directory. You might find that the same article on EZA ranks way way above your own copy, but it's a mistake to assume that your copy would have ranked if not for this. It's ranking on EZA because of the domain authority and internal links, is passing juice to your site and is potentially sending you traffic.