But is it really a big problem that you should be worried about?

And if you avoid duplication at all costs, could you actually be hurting yourself?

First of all, it's impossible for you to write an article and completely avoid duplication. When you add an article to a directory, or you send it to an email group, it's understood that your article will be used by other people as content on their sites.

In addition to this fact, it's also understood that whomever uses it must leave it intact.

So to think that you should avoid duplication, in this regard, actually defeats one of the biggest reasons why you'd want to write and submit articles in the first place. That is, to get other people to add your articles to their sites to increase back links for you.

And while we're on the subject of back links, let's look at why they're so important . . .

When the search engines index sites, one of the things they look for is other sites they're linked to. The purpose for this is they're looking for popular information that a lot of people are using as a recommendation to their readers.

The more sites linking to a particular article or other web page, the greater the popularity of that article or site appears to be to the search engines.

So if an article appears on hundreds or even thousands of sites as a good reference, the search engines will also deem it good information and use it more readily as a listing during a search inquiry for related keywords.

But now the problem with changing an article over and over so that a different version appears on all other sites, is that each version would be considered a different article. So rather than a thousand sites all linking to one apparently very popular article, you'd have a thousand articles all being displayed on one site.

Considering that each appearance of an article on another site is like a "yes vote" to the search engines in their quest for popular information, which would you rather have?

A thousand articles all saying basically the same thing with one "yes vote" each? Or one article with a thousand "yes votes"?

Which would you think the search engines would pay more heed to?

So the bottom line on this train of thought is, if you want a lot of exposure from your articles, it would be better to write a number of good ones that teach or explain something different and get them posted to all sources.

Wouldn't you say?

These are just a couple of facts that seem to bring the "duplication problem" some problems of its own.

So before you listen to those who teach that you need to concern yourself with it, it might be best to do a little research and a lot of logical thinking on your own.