Lots of people are doing article trades or posting them out for massive distribution. They do this hoping for a traffic flow and also for the links that will appear within the article or in their signature line.

I think that this worked great in the early days of SEO, but it has become so common that the field is overworked. Why should the search engines index 200 copies of the same article and hold them ready for display in the SERPS? And, if the search engines see these 200 instances of duplicate content, why should they give you significant power from the links? IMO they will start to smell manipulation soon if they have not smelled it for quite a while.

Furthermore, if all of those 200 duplicate articles are posted and indexed on 200 websites then they will all compete for the same search traffic. Why not just have that one article on YOUR site? That way you can hog ALL of the inbound natural links that your writing can earn.

I believe that you will get the most value from articles if you give a very small number of very high quality articles to a very small number of very powerful and very popular websites. I don't think that giving 200 copies of the same article to 200 other sites will yield an enormously greater reward. For that reason I feel that exclusive or very tight distribution will yield the best results.

I am betting all of my money on this.... If you are a person who can write really good articles you should, first, put them exclusively on your own site, making your own site "The Gospel" for the subjects that you are writing about. After that you can write a very small number of very high quality articles and distribute them selectivly to a small number of powerful sites. These articles should provide premium and complete information about a specific topic and make the reader drool to learn more. Then the article closes with an invitation to your site where The Complete Gospel on the same topic can be viewed for free or small fee. If you can do this type of writing and connect with other webmasters I think that your site will grow to tightly control a good chunk of internet turf.

OK... I am sure that many who read this will have other or additional ideas. Weigh in on this topic if you feel strongly about it.