The "duplicate content penalty" is not a myth. Prove it to yourself with this simple test. The first step is to submit a quality article and get it published on 300 or more sites. Then do a search for the title of the article a couple weeks later on Google. Expect to see about 300 results if you've submitted to enough sites? Next you'll want to monitor the result of that search for a few weeks. Take notice of the diminishing returns as the search results slowly fade to only about 16 links? After the last result, you'll see message something like this:

"In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the 16 already displayed. If you like, you can repeat the search with the omitted results included." This is the infamous "duplicate result penalty".

So you can see it's not a good idea to submit the same article over and over again. Using Google's verbiage, perhaps it should be called the "similar results omission." If Google had perfected their "penalty" there would only be one search result versus 16.

When you consider that 300 is 18.75 times as many results as 16, you'll see the devastating results of the "duplicate content penalty." Unfortunately, the means you must submit 18.75 times more articles to achieve the same results from article marketing that you did just a few years ago. There are two solutions. If you're crazy, you migh consider actually submitting a different article to each site. Luckily, there's a better solution called ArticleROI which does most of the work for you automatically.

If you do either of the above, you can retain all 300 of those articles in the Google results. If you do the math, you'll see results increase by 18.75 times with no more effort on your part. The article marketing tool I use to acheive these greater results is ArticleROI.