Unless you've been living under a shell or are only new to the internet you'll have heard about the problems of unique content on the internet.

If you haven't here's a quick catch up.

Once upon a time you used to be able to send your article to every corner of the internet and the search engines would spider it and allow you a link back to your site. For example if you send it to 100 different locations eventually, over time, the search engines would register it and give you 100 back links to your site.

But then the problem started, if your average Joe/Josephine Soap typed in ?Dog Biscuits? into ?Google? and your article was written on dog biscuits, there was the chance that your article would come up again and again in the search results. (While it may be a good article nobody wants to read your article over and over again.)

So, Google came up with the idea to clamp down on duplicate copies of content and only give you credit for one or maybe two times that it came up.

And so the problem with duplicate content came up and why everybody should be using unique content.

So this brings us back to the question, should you pay or use software to mass distribute your article anymore? Is it a waste of time and money?

I don't believe so, and for these 3 reasons.

? Are you really writing articles for back links or for free traffic?

As we now know you mightn't get as many back links as you used to but if you're looking for free traffic to your website writing article is still the best way. Your article on all of those other sites might not show up in the search engines but you still have a working link that's leading traffic back to your site. Plus all the ezine authors that use your article and send traffic to you.

? The experts are still doing it.

I run an article directory myself and I still see articles coming in from mass distribution sites with some of the ?guru's? names attached to them. If the experts are still doing it there must still be a good reason for it.

? Duplicate content doesn't see to matter with the big stories online.

If we look at the tragedy of the earthquake in China or the latest dress that J-Lo bought you can find them coming up again and again on numerous sites. Why hasn't ?Google? clamped down on this? Could it have something to do with the content? Personally I think if your content is good and worthwhile it's going to be used a lot on the net and gain you a lot of back links.

Finally

Yes, the problem of duplicate content is here for good and for good reason it's not because of nasty ole Google spoiling our party but to give the average surfer the best choice of information.

But, do I think we should all start panicking and running around like ?chicken little? screaming the skies falling down.

Nope! But there are going to be people that play it all up and say we're going to need to spend money on this software or that tool to get the best results, but who are they really serving ?you? or ?themselves.?

Remember the ?Millennium Bug? where all the planes were going to drop out of the sky at a sec past midnight 1999? Look what happened there and how much was made by those people scaring us.

Will I be mass submitting this article? What do you think?