I would think with all the PHd’s at Google they could write a script into their algorithm that gives you credit just for the first link they find from duplicate content. I know for a fact that not all the places you submit that article will ever show up in google webmaster tools or even the yahoo explorer tool. After all, mass submitting to articles and gaining 100s of new links inside the same exact content isn’t exactly natural looking.

Great Question. This would be my suggestion.

Ezinearticles.com and Articlesbase.com are the TWO most trusted, SEO result driven Article Directories on the web therefore for those two ONLY submit Unique content to each. However there are hundreds if not thousands of other less popular article directories that you may mass distribute articles to. The idea with this is to create a blog on your site, publish a unique article, wait for Google to crawl the article (to do so go to google and type cache:http://www.your-blog-post-url.com i.e. cache:http://www.weddingseoblog.com/wedding-internet-marketing/avoid-duplicate-content/). If Google has cached your page you should see a gray box above your website that reads This is Google’s cache of . It also displays the time and date that it was cached. Once you see that your page has been cached (in Google’s eyes you originated this content and now have the proper credit). Now what you can do is submit that article to as many article directories as possible using a max of 3 anchor texts of choice. Make sure that one of those anchors are pointing back to the original blog post url though….

Summery:

1) Only publish Unique Content to EzineArticles.com & Articlesbase.com (You will be very surprised by the SEO results)
2) Mass-distribute your blog posts AFTER they have been cached by Google (Great way to build hundreds of links from 1 article) Not to worry about Duplicate content, since you were the first person to publish the article in Googles eyes) The article directories will get penalized for it, but you still benefit from a link, and in the world of SEO — links are like GOLD.

I hope this helps – Good Luck

-Jason Hennessey

Looking forward to more of your posts.

Thanks

Your friends at the Wedding Favors Association of Atlanta, GA

At what point does content become duplicate?

A phrase?
A sentence?
2 sentences?
A paragraph?

Obviously setting up links uses certain key phrases or a sentence or two. How is that viewed?

Thanks