does duplicate content affect SEO?

Google is very smart and like only the unique content in your website.i submit the unique article on top most sites then write more for submitting other.

Why? That's what I'm getting at. You seem to think that search engines will discredit the article if it is found on too many sites. That is just not true.

Really mate, you can't be serious.

You're shooting yourself in the foot with this strategy. Just sayin'. I market to many different niches, so to just use one medium competition niche as an example; I can be found at between 5 and 7 positions on page one, depending on google's daily dance. My own site sits consistently #1, my ezine article is at consistent #3, my closest competitor (who copied my EZA article and placed it on his site) is at #4, my goarticles submission sits at position #8. On the second page I'm at 3 different spots with my articlesbase submission, squidoo, e.t.c... and they occasionally tango their way up to page one when google starts the music. This is all ONE article verbatim, word for word, syndicated over 50 times.

The residual article directory traffic along with the google traffic I get from owning so much real estate top 20 squashes what I would get only shooting for #1. And the backlinks I received from mass syndication is what helped to soar - and keep my authority site at position #1 in the first place.

Tell me, how has mass syndication of my 1 piece of content hurt me? It hasn't - it's done nothing but give me heaps of traffic, clicks, exposure and sales that otherwise I'd never see.

Furthermore, after a rather contentious argument over this last year a few of us did an experiment in a niche with lower competition, just to observe the results- to see if there was any sandboxing or devaluation of link weight from mass syndication. What ended up happening as 3 of us SEO'd 8 different directories, using 1 article? We dominated the first page, and eagerly watched as nothing was placed in the "supplemental" index, nothing at all was harmed from the effort.

I have since successfully reproduced this result more than a few times, and my pockets thank me for working smart, and not working myself to death chasing an "original only" fallacy because of some persistent and ridiculous interwebz myth about "duplicate content penalties".

Oh, and there's this. Which one of these sites is being penalized exactly?

There's no doubt that unique content will always beat syndicated content, just from the originality and freshness factor. That is obvious. Having said that, if 1 article costs lowest 25.00 (I don't buy cheap articles), what is the cost for 100? 2,500.00. If writing an article takes me 1 hour, what's the time constraint on 100? 100 hours, or twelve, 8 hour days of solid writing. I syndicate my articles effectively in about an hour. Can you honestly tell me that an investment of that kind of time and/or money could ever be worth simply syndicating 1 article and garnishing almost identical traffic and results in the end?

I've said it before, and here I go again. Article Directories, blogs, static sites, e.t.c... are like radio stations; your article being the "song". You wouldn't change your song every time you submitted it to a different radio station, yes? To re-record a song and reproduce it - or to write a new song every time would bankrupt an artist in a few days. Nor should you feel any need to change an article or limit your submissions to a certain number. It is incredibly poor use of time and money for a negligible - arguably non existent boost in return.