Good question. It doesn’t “hurt” your pages, but why compete against yourself?

Sure, it brings in a few extra links and a little more exposure, but now your stepping on your own feet with pages from article directories competing against your own pages.

If your site has a good amount of authority, then it wouldn’t be a problem. But if your site is relatively new and/or doesn’t have a whole lot of authority there’s a good chance those articles will be competing with your pages and theres a very good chance those article pages will rise above your own in the SERPS.

yep, it’s ok to broaden your submissions, just don’t get too crazy with it.

Thanks for the compliments! I’m glad you enjoyed the report

I’ve been submitting articles to ezinearticles.com for about a month to promote a new niche blog. I was reticent to branch out to other article directories, because I wasn’t sure about the duplicate content penalty. I had a feeling it wasn’t really a factor, even though some people make a lot of noise about it. After all, why on earth would so many smart people use article marketing to good effect if it was just going to bring grief?

Well, now I know the real scoop and can go on to worrying about something else!

Thanks again.

(BTW, I just read your Easy SEO e-book and got the link to this post from there. The e-book was very helpful.)

Anyway, what you say above makes sense to me and you back it up. I’m happy to go with that!

It doesn’t affect me too much except for the scrapers as I use the more tag (so I don’t have full posts on my category pages etc).

Good deal, Best of luck with your new site.

Hi Stephen,

Well, most people go off of what people tell them, so you’re definitely not alone on that one

I guess Court should possibly publish some results of a case study or something to prove his theory? I’d love to see that because there is no duplicate content “filter.”

This is food for thought indeed!

I’ve got to admit I got a bit caught up in the duplicate content things, just going by what others were saying. Over the last few months I’ve begun to wonder if it’s really such an issue. So this post comes at a good time – what you’re saying makes sense to me.

It’s interesting that some people are still making a big deal about it – I’m thinking of Courtney Tuttle and Vic who together run Blogging Zoom. They’ve made a rule that people can’t copy and paste the description of posts submitted to Blogging Zoom, because they say it will hurt the bloggers with Google’s duplicate content filter. Both those guys seems to know what they’re doing, but I thought it was a little odd.

So, not sure what to think – food for thought as I say – but I’m not going to worry too much about it personally.