Republishing an article is copying with permission. While this is a strictly legal thing to do as in fact the authors of all those articles are encouraging such copying and would like their articles to appear in as many places on the world wide web as possible from a search engine perspective copying articles can be a crime for a few reasons. When search engines evaluate a web site they look at many factors. Content is a very important factor search engines are looking at. When evaluating a web site content search engines are trying to figure out the quality and relevance of such content. Relevancy is measured by the association of keywords between the content and the other parts of the page it is on and the complete web site.

Quality is measured in many ways from the quality of the language and grammar to the originality of the content. For example some search engines would penalize content that has spelling mistakes in it. There is no doubt that the most important factor when it comes to content is originality. The Internet is full of the same content copied over and over again. Generally search engines do not like content being copied. Search engines instead prefer web sites to link to the original content rather than copy it in while on their pages. Copying is not all bad as sometimes it does make sense to copy. The way search engines evaluate if a content is original or not is complex. They can for example look at their index and see if the same content was found on other pages. But even if they find that content on other pages how can they tell which one is the real original creator or owner of the content? They just can not. Instead most search engines would try to use some linking analysis to figure out which web site is considered the authority of such content. The idea is simple they assume that the authority for a specific content will tend to have many sites linking to it as opposed to the copying sites which tend to have no such inbound links.

Using free article directories for content is good practice if done carefully and while paying attention and understanding how such content is evaluated. For example one simple thing you can do is to constantly visit a few free articles web sites that you like or alternatively sign up to their RSS feed. When new content appears on those sites that you would like to use copy it and use it as soon as possible. This will ensure that the content you copy to your site is relatively fresh and that it appears on your site more or less the same time as it appears on other parts of the web. This will make it look more authoritative to search engines.

Some web masters have tried all kind of schemes to make search engines think that their content is completely original. Some well known ones are shuffling of an article or using synonyms replacing many of the article keywords. The problem with such practices is that they usually tend to make the articles less usable to humans or even totally useless. The other problem is that search engines have become more and more sophisticated in identifying such schemes and when they do they would heavily penalize such sites all the way to actually removing them from their index altogether.