I just wanted to clear up a couple of things when it comes to what duplicate content is and what it is not. Many people believe, that if you write an article, submit it to Ezine articles, that it can’t be used elsewhere. That is entirely a myth and I will give you a an example to prove my point. What I will say is, duplicate content penalties do exist, but perhaps in a different way you are thinking.
Question: Have you ever seen the same News story on multiple websites? Of course you and they are not penalized.
I had a press release done for me with the following title: “Highly Acclaimed Online Expert Updates Internet Marketing Tools Recommendation.” This article appears in thousands of places all over the web. Did any of those sites get de-indexed because of that? Not at all. So, you can use the same article in multiple places and Google will index them. Will they show all of the results? Never and neither will any search engine because, they don’t want to give away how they rank. If they showed all of the results, in theory, a person could reverse engineer how they do it.
You see, when the spider bots crawl a particular page, they are looking at the entire content. So, when you have your article on 1 of their pages, its the entire page and not just looking at your content. So, in the context of your article, its unique at every website or article directory you are placing content.
Does that mean you should never change it? Heck no because, I still like to change things up abit sometimes. Not always, but sometimes I do.
So, when does duplicate content actually hurt you?
Its when you place the same article on 1 page of your site and put the same article elsewhere on another page of your site. That is when you can get into trouble with Google and the other search engines.
With the recent panda update, one thing is coming out that you should be aware. If you want your site to do well, you should always have unique and well written content on your site. The last thing you should have, is a large percentage of content that is used elsewhere. Does that make sense?
OK, lets look at it this way. If all you do is take news stories and place them on your site, you will not necessarily get penalized, but I highly doubt you will ever rank for any serious keyword term either. You could be eventually de-indexed. So, why take the chance.
Yes, many people in internet marketing still use this method and it still works for some. But the days are numbered as I believe, and many others. That if you want to do well in internet marketing, then the more quality and unique content, the better it will be for your site.