Is it still cool to do this?

It's cool, effective, and highly recommended. Do it now.

does it DEVALUE my content though? after this panda thing, nobody seems to know for sure...

You were right! You are going to hear differing opinions on this

I say it's not a great idea - just swing by alexa and take a look at ezinearticles.com. Their traffic has dropped substantially since "farmer/panda" because their business model revolves around providing article content to be reused on other websites.

The farmer update essentially cracks down on duplicate article content favoring the most authoritative version of the article (however that's determined!) and all but eliminating duplicates.

In short - I recommend using unique and different articles to link back with.

Thanks

I have noticed many of my articles have been syndicated i.e. somebody has taken them, published onto a crappy blog and then linked to the source. Effectively this is exactly the same as what would happen if I did it myself with EZA. On one hand I think "I only want unique content on my site", and on the other I think "a backlink is a backlink..."

Confused? yes.

Yes, unquestionably. (I don't think you'll get "various answers" to that one: it's simply factual. The only article directory that won't accept that is "Buzzle".)

In my opinion, absolutely dreadful.

There's no great benefit for you in linking back to another copy of the same article that people have just read in an article directory. I'd expect to lose a lot of the traffic, that way. They'll get there and think "Hold on ... what's going on here? I've just read this" and click away.

The articles go on my site first and get indexed there for all the obvious reasons, but when they subsequently get submitted to article directories, the links in the resource-boxes are to my landing page, not to another copy of the same article.

But all this is, to some extent, "beside the point".

The question is: when a potential customer finds one of your articles by putting one of its keywords into a search engine as his search terms, what do you want him to find - an article directory copy (I don't know about you, but I lose most of that traffic because article directories are full of AdSense and other distraction and many people won't "click through") or the copy on your own site ("job done")?

Surely you want them coming straight to your website, not veering off to an article directory?

Like many successful article marketers here, I use article directories regularly, but not so much for traffic! You see what I mean, perhaps? It's easy to imagine that you're getting traffic from article directories when what you're really doing is sending your traffic to article directories. That isn't article marketing: it's just "article directory marketing", and it can be done at the expense of your own site.

What I suggest is that you use a trial version(7$ for 7 days then 77$/year) of TheBestSpinner and create some spinned versions of your article, then submit those to different directories. Because they are spinned versions of each other ,google gets it! and it ranks it higher... But if they are exactly the same then the effect is lower

You could probably turn one 600 word article into several smaller articles that you can post with a link back to the original however it would be best of each smaller article was completely re-written before posting.