Thanks for your questions–

I’ve been wondering how article marketing is treated in terms of “duplicate content”. If one submits an article to an article submission service and it then distributes to several publishers, is the content not then considered duplicate?

From an search engine’s point of view, placing articles automatically all over the net is not much different whether done automatically or manually. Even when done automatically, the articles can take a while to appear as sites approve and publish the articles in question.

Neither should article submissions be seen as some sort of underhanded tactic – it’s not, article submissions simply involve sharing content legitimately with other sites on the web who wish to publish it.

Press releases work in a similar way, and a whole load of other online content is syndicated too, not just article submissions.

While the search engines don’t see it as a problem if sites contain the same content, this doesn’t mean that they want to show their users the same article on a ton of different sites in the search results; they want to show a variety of different content that may be helpful to the user.

So they do recognize duplicate content, but that doesn’t mean they penalize sites because of it– syndicated content plays a big part on the web and how the web works (eg. RSS provides an easy method to spread syndicated content).

Article submissions increase your chances of one of your articles showing up on one of the sites on which it is published when a user searches on a particular topic. The more articles you have out there, and the more sites your articles are published on, the more chances you have that a search engine user will click to read your article when searching for something.

So, I haven’t noticed that the duplicate content issue plays that big a role in a website’s results, but knowing that some people are very concerned, we do offer a free tool to the members of SubmitYOURArticle.com called ArticleLeverage, which allows the author to create unlimited variations of their article, which decreases the amount of duplicate content.

You had also asked:

Or say for instance you write on a popular topic and there are hundreds of other related articles that have a slightly different opinion, is that not also considered duplicate content therefore reducing your ability to drive traffic through search engines to your site?

No, writing on the same general topic as someone else is not considered duplicate content.

It is fine for an article to be on the same general topic–you’ll find people writing all over the internet giving various opinions on topics, and when you do a search on Google for anything, you’ll see lots of different results on that same topic.

You do not need to be the only one writing on your topic in order to see results.

It is fine to write on a popular topic–if you look at any article directory you’ll see that they have categories that you can choose from. Those categories are the ‘popular topics’. And it works the same with other types of marketing as well–if you have a blog, you can be writing on the same topic as other blogs, and you can still see great results. You do not need to be the only one writing on your topic.

I hope that helps!