Can I copy my own site posts to use for article submission?

If you copy content from your website you're article will get most likely flagged. It is better to use unique content for each article website google like it and so do article directories.

I've always posted to my website first and then submitted to ezinearticles afterwards and never had a problem with it. I imagine they'd like totally unique, but unless they've made recent changes they don't demand it. They just demand that the article is yours and that you can prove it.

I have no reason to believe it would matter if I then submitted the identical piece to other directories as I don't think I've ever done it. I usually do change it up a bit for the other directories after my own site and ezinearticles have had it, but the same version of article MKII goes out to them all. If these articles are getting flagged by anyone then they are not feeling a thing and still pulling in profit.

I would recommend modifying your article a little. It can be flagged as duplicate content, and you don't want to take the risk. Either way, since your site posted it first, and hopefully will get indexed first, your site probably won't be flagged. However, to get the best bang out of your submissions, you want it to be somewhat unique.

You can always purchase an article spinner and do it that way. It goes through your articles and automatically spins it to a new enough article not to get flagged by google. They are relatively inexpensive and you can turn one article into many. There are a few good quality spinners out there and if you are REALLY not trying to redo the content yourself, that would be the way to go.

I haven't personally used them, but I know some people who have and have had some decent success with them.

try to spin or rewrite ur article mate..u wont get disappoint then...

Some duplicate content is acceptable, many newspapers across the world republish identical articles and Google indexes them. It would be impossible for every newspaper in the world to have reporters covering every story. Also, you want to syndicate your content to a very wide audience. It is incorrect to think everyone will visit your site, read ezinearticles or even use Google. However, everyone should get the chance to read your great content!

Newspapers and other publications also combine duplicate work with their local content to create a unique mashup. I've seen WebMD articles in Google Health. The problem with our articles revolves around the fact that they end up on directory pages with no other content.

Search engines will ignore them after they are spidered too many times in various directories. The penalty of that is no backlink credit. The best solution is to vary text somewhat. I've heard even changing titles, first paragraphs, adding HTML markup, etc helps.

yeah, spin or rewrite...

erm there is a wordpress plugin to submit your blog posts to ezine. you can submit the EXACT post with no penalty. The only problem is that your site will be competitiveness with the Ezine post for the same keywords, so you are risking out ranking yourself.

Yes you can but make sure you spin them so that you do not get slapped in the face by google for duplicate content. I suggest you spin unique for each article directory as well

Ehh could, should, would?

Better to have dynamic content; but if you spin it you should be fine.

unique content does not matter in my review so go with it and get experiences with different tactics it will get you at the point where you can never experiences in your online business...

the answer is simple... go ahead, post your article to any article directories. but just make sure that the post on your site or blog has been indexed already.

If you want to repurpose your old postings modify accoridngly and then run them through a service such as copyscape to see if they are unique enough.

You'll run into three issues:

1. You're going to see that those article sites with greater authority will dilute the original content on your site by ranking higher for keywords your site may have ranked for.

2. Supplemental indexing always becomes an issue.

3. Some of the sites like seeing original content being submitted.

A better idea would be to use an article spinner and submit different versions.

Just starting out this subject appears to the one with the most "urban legends"!
Thanks for the clarification but please clear up the issue about the indexing sequence. As I understand it the search engines will only "see" (if that's the right term?) the article once for search purposes as in a search they don't want to have the same article coming up multiple times?

Technically you can, but I don't suggest that you do. If its duplicate content then it's not original even if you're the one who wrote it. Also, you don't want someone to read your article and then find the exact same writing work on your website or blog. At minimum you will want to change 30% of your article before publishing it on your site/blog. You can usually achieve this by changing the first and last sentence of each paragraph. By changing 30% of the article it will appear as original content, but again think about your readers.

Most article directories will allow you to publish articles that are already published some where else and others will not.

Yes just change about 30% to 50% of each page. So if you have 5 paragraphs reword 3 of them.

All depends on who you are submitting to.

I've been reading through the Google webmaster help forums, and I've seen several threads where people complained about their sites losing ranking and "bionic helpers" (and even a Google employee) saying something about their site having little original content, alluding that this is the reason why their site is sucking in the SERPs. In some of those cases it was a person who had posted most of their entire site to article directories.

I suppose I'd tend to believe the people that have been doing this for a while. It would make sense that there would be no penalty for doing this. However, I've never seen anyone actually say that posting things from your website to article directories has any benefit to doing this. It seems plausible to me that Google might devalue a link coming from a site that is 95% identical to something already on your site. This is assuming you're submitting articles for the backlinks, which it seems like the only reason to do it if you're not specifically article marketing (the way I understand it).

The whole SEO thing really sucks. It's almost impossible to tell what is truth or is someone perpetuating a lie because they sell software that's supposed to help the "problem." Hell, this is a competitive field. For all I know it could be people trying to convince you things are "okay" to do knowing full well that they aren't. I'm not insinuating anything... it's just so incredibly confusing because there are very, very few objective facts about the whole thing and a LOT of people trying to make money from that.