Lately I've been thinking about article writing for SEO. I have put less than 10 articles at the various article sites and have gotton about 300 links from these articles in a year and half. Most of these are low PR. There are a few good ones with PR3-4 and some even bring traffic.. BUT Basically I get links from duplicate content. I think SE will in the future look at the text around links and guess what... the text around those links is the same (author bio). So, I've been thinking about setting up this deal. I write an article on a subject requested by another webmaster. Only he is allowed to publish the article on his site. I get a link from it being careful to use different author bio every time. We are both happy - he gets a unique article, I get a link that is hard to be detected as artificial/affiliated. Of course, the webmaster will need good authors, and the authors should pick established sites or sites that will get well established in the future. So.. is there an article network/site that offers this kind of a deal?
I don't know of any site like that. The only way to achieve this, that I kniow about is to just submit your article to the site. Many major sites are always looking for unique content so by contacting them, you may be able to form an agreement. I am not sure what your success rate will be in persuading them to put the live link up. A lot of the sites that accept unique content for publication prefer a pay-for model rather than a link-for. As far as your initial assesment that at some point Google will penalize those submitting articles in some way, I just don't agree. It goes against everything the internet is about. Press Releases and Articles have always been a great way to build up link popularity and conversions and I believe always will be. If Google started penalizing because an article was used more than once, they would have to start from within. Many of their articles are AP and have a VERY wide distribution. I think, as it always has, it comes down to quality. It would make no sense for people to be penalized for offering good, related content to their visitors. Those exploiting article distribution sites using automated tools trying to squeeze backlinks out of them are the ones that will be seeing the issues you have brought up.
I am not saying these article links will get penalized. I think that they will bring less value than links from unique content.
Ok, Unique articles are more valuable than syndicated ones for a variety of reasons and I typically advise that people utilize both. I'm not sure I agree that Google will devalue the links themselves but I do see your point. I think that the unique articles you are proposing will be worth it even if Google values the link the same, mostly because the conversions tend to be higher on unique articles. I would be curious to hear from people who have been succesful getting their unique articles published on major websites.
Unless your unique content is going to get published in a high trafic website or an authoritative website, it's better just to keep it on your site. Besides if your so consern about this you can change Your article a little bit (or just the bio) each time you put it up in a diferrent article site.
If haven't it be different really concerns you, I suppose you could put a note like this in the Authors Box: Also - Most article sites let you change your Bio box so you could just edit it every week as the articles were being picked up
Let's think about it from the publisher's perspective. Most sites that publish articles from the article directories are low quality/full of duplicate content. Very few authorative sites would like to publish an article that's all over the web (even if it is of high quality). Every webmaster wants orginal content and a unique article adds more value to a site. Plus, if the article is all over the web, there is a high probability some of the other sites will outrank it.