article syndication and penguin

Sorry, but it really doesn't at all.

(You're thinking of the passive syndication potential, perhaps? That's only an optional, additional afterthought.)

I'm not submitting my articles to "a few major directories". This is what I'm doing.

I do actually submit each of my articles to Ezine Articles, as a kind of "last stage afterthought", after everything else I've done with them, just to see if anyone else to whom I haven't syndicated it wants to find it there and re-publish it (i.e. for a little bit of extra "passive syndication", at the end of the process - and I do sometimes achieve some, even now, having built up my syndication-lists over the years!). But that's all. There's no additional benefit from using article directories additional to EZA (unless possibly you can find one specifically limited to your own niche: that would be worth trying, too).

I don't think so. (I don't think anyone knows the answer to this with certainty.) I think you'd need to submit to huge numbers of article directories to incur a penalty. But the point is that doing so won't actually help you, anyway. The reality is that once your article is in Ezine Articles, you're no more likely to achieve additional passive syndication, at the end of your syndication process, by having it in GoArticles or another directory as well. At least 99% (if not 100%) of publishers looking for content to syndicate from a directory are going to go to Ezine Articles first, because it's the most well-known and best one, and the one that everyone has heard of. And articles not up to EZA's acceptance standards are not syndicable anyway. So it's a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy.

I use to submit to GoArticles (and some others, too) for a long time. But when I achieved additional, passive syndication through using article directories, the copy syndicated was always the EZA one. (I could always tell, from my little "punctuation trick", described here).

The potential exception, again, might be a subject-specific article directory, if you can find one (I never can).

There are certainly many people whose sites have been heavily penalized for "over-optimization" (that's a euphemism for "spammy backlinks on non-context-relevant sites, that look like they're bought and/or produced by software"), but as far as I know they've submitted to large numbers (hundreds) of article directories, with or without spinning the articles (though often "with"). Article directories, of course, are non-context-relevant sites.

And Google's Penguin likes to give the sites "mass-linked-to" that way the wet fish-slapping treatment.

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