Confused

That is wrong. From the perspective of article marketing, it's the determination of that at the site level that's the significant one. That's why article directory backlinks are worthless. That was the purpose and outcome of the largest of the 2011 Panda updates.

The underlying basis of the SEO benefits from content syndication (the way that so many of us are making our full-time livings here), arises partly because what you've said above isn't so. And Google has made it very clear that it isn't going to be so, either.

Of course they don't. Nobody's suggesting that they do that. If you imagined that any of the article marketers here suggested that, you might want to brush up your reading skills, a little?!

What you don't realise (in contrast to the very large and growing number of us who are making our livings this way) is that there are still enormous cumulative advantages of acquiring the initial indexation-rights for one's own site. The way you're looking at it is the way of all the people who end up starting off threads with titles like "Article Marketing Doesn't Work Any More" because their own sites can't even outrank an article directory. And they never realise that they did it to themselves.

If you want to learn something, instead of repeating the myths of the Urban Myth School of SEO, take a look through this thread, some time: http://www.warriorforum.com/main-int...eza-first.html . In it, you'll find a whole succession of successful, experienced, professional article marketers (unlike you, we're people who are making a living from article marketing) explaining at length and in detail all our shared reasons for always publishing all our content on our own sites first and not submitting it anywhere else until after it's been indexed.

Every algorithm-change Google makes helps us out. And there are reasons for that!

All those Panda updates of 2011 were a huge bonus for us: they made it possible for us to put all our articles in EZA without any risk that our potential customers might find them there (obviously the last thing we'd want, for all the reasons explained in this post).

The Penguin updates did us further favors, clearing out of the SERP's so many of the sites of "marketers" who had acquired large numbers of backlinks from non-relevant-sites. Marketers who - if they thought about it at all - believed like you do that "Contextual relevancy is determined at the page level, not the site level".

The people who believed that, with you, are the same ones whose businesses were hammered by all those Google updates.

The people who knew that what you've said isn't true were (as usual) the beneficiaries.

This is why article marketers don't like posting down here. It's the "Wild Urban Myth" section of the forum, where grotesque misinformation fills more space than helpful commentary.

One of the reasons some people have such difficulty with article marketing is that they read deeply mistaken comments like the ones you've just offered, and they actually believe them! That's why they're typically not earning a living through their online "businesses".