Listen up people, because this is the truth: SYNDICATION HAS BEEN THE STANDARD MEDIA PRACTICE FOR DECADES. Syndication is a way of sharing information in the publishing world. You will NEVER be penalized for submitting the same EXACT article to one, two or even two hundred or more directories. RSS feeds, aggregators and ALL syndication tools take one piece of content and send that out to their affiliates in the exact same format that it’s in. In fact, rewriting someone else’s work or changing it for submission purposes is called plagiarism.

There’s also such a thing as self-plagiarism, and if you’re rewriting your content at anything less than 100% original; you’re guilty. Think about it. What you’re saying is: I either care about quality or being penalized so much that I am going to take my 1 good article and turn it into a number of mediocre articles, then send those out. Does this make sense to anyone? Ever?

This “only submit one unique article to each source” myth is one of the oldest in the IM industry and I get so tired of seeing otherwise intelligent people propagate it. Just ask anyone who has a media or journalistic background: SYNDICATION is the lifeblood of the information age! And Google will NEVER penalize you for “duplicate content” because properly syndicated work is NOT duplicate content.

People, syndicate your articles. Send them to as many HIGH QUALITY directories as you want. Think about it – would your readers rather read one awesome original article, or would they rather stumble upon a rewrite that you only wrote because you thought you had to in order to prevent being penalized? Use your head!

The important thing to remember is to make sure your content is indexed on your own website first. Then send it out to the world – that’s the whole point of syndication and anyone who tells you differently is poorly and regrettably misinformed. If the content is indexed on your site first, search engines will recognize it as the original source and that piece of content will hold the most weight when it comes to ranking considerations. That’s why I no longer care when people steal my work. Screw ‘em.

In fact, you can even take articles from directories and put them on your own site, (I don’t recommend this I am just making a point.) thereby syndicating them. As long as you credit the original source with the original link, you’ll never be penalized for duplicate content because you properly syndicated it, and syndication is GOOD.

The last comments on this post was more than a year ago so I hope in that time you posters above me learned that you’ve been listening to a bunch of hype.

Write quality content.
Index it on your site first.
Send it to as many directories or editor email inboxes as you like.
Stop listening to useless internet marketing myths and get informed.

I would suggest submitting same article to about 20 sites then change it around a bit, if you have a list of 1500 websites submit it to more. For top article websites try keep each one unique – although sharing it with 3 wont be so bad. Even if you worked through the article again changing things you can end up with a totally new article. (well that depends how much you know about the subject matter).

Seriously would you consider writing a new article for every directory out there!!!