Article marketing is one of the many ways to send traffic and backlinks towards your site. Although it’s more time-consuming than methods like high pagerank dofollow blog commenting, blog carnivals, and forum marketing, it still yields results.
Google, of course, hates duplicate content and thus probably views articles reposted on different sites with contempt. Unless you intend only to submit your article to a single directory (why even go through the effort?), your poor content might suffer!
Google actually doesn’t penalize for duplicate content on different domains in most cases - props goes to Internet Marketing Strategies for pointing that out (note to self: research topics before posting about them. Not that I don’t already do that, of course. Wink wink. Nudge nudge). Google simply dislikes duplicate content on the same site (i.e. the normal and printer versions of an article), so submitting the same article to various directories should be fine. There are other uses for this trick to make money blogging, though, so don’t fret.
GETTING AROUND THE PROBLEM
Ironically, a simple way to get rid of duplicate content and bypass Google’s stringent content policies is with Google itself. Its translation tool, to be exact.
Basically, just plug in your text and translate it a few times. For example, your pattern could go something like English -> Spanish -> French -> Russian -> German -> English. At the end of this chain, you’ll get a whole new article with some nice synonyms and different phrases used. Just make sure to proofread the article, or else “One day, Roberto the Magician decided to pull a rabbit out of his magical hat at a birthday party.” can turn into “One day, Roberto, a magician decided to send a rabbit from his hat magic child to a birthday celebration.”
Every new combination results in a whole new article, and it shouldn’t be too hard to whip up a script that does this automatically due to Google’s lack of a captcha, creating a simple way to spin out hundreds of different and often nonsensical articles.