1. Your links come from quality sites. While to a large extent Google judges every page on an individual basis, it also pays attention to the domain pages are on.  That’s why an article on Ezinearticles.com will often rank higher than it would if you put it on a new site.  Google trust is golden.

2. You control the anchor text. Web directories allow you to put an anchor-texted backlink inside your author profile.  The anchor text in your links will help you to rank well for specific keywords.  You don’t always get to choose the anchor text in links back to your site–but with article marketing, you do!

Some directories such as Articlesbase.com will also let you link to your website in the body text of your article.

3. Your links will be contextually relevant.  The text that surrounds your links can influence the way Google sees that link.  Relevant content can only help you out!

4. You can get good traffic before you get good rankings! Article directory pages often rank well and quickly for their keywords.  The best of these sites also have very good internal linking schemes that help people find your content.  It’s quite possible to get lots of traffic before you ever even appear in Google.

About a week ago, I had to write some content about the two most (then-) recent bank failures in the U.S.  (this search was in early June and uncovered events from late May; at least one other bank has been shut down since that time).  The first Google SERP showed multiple pages on different sites, all with the same story.

I’m not just talking about the same story, rewritten.  Fully four of the results carried the exact same text.  Five of the rest had a rewritten version of the same story; most of them took huge chunks from the four dupe results just mentioned.

I went over to MSN’s search engine and got more varied results.  About three of them had more substantial content than most of what I’d found with Google (the really good result on G was from Bloomberg.com, a standard in the banking industry).

One week later, the 1st page results in Google look a little better.  But they still aren’t as varied and useful as what I found when I used MSN’s search engine.  (I haven’t played much with Bing yet, but you can bet I’m going to.)

So yes, you can get away with duplicate content, but not always for very long.  Then again, some key phrases seem to consistently show a lot of duplicate content results.

Also keep in mind that if you’re a writer, it really pays to use other search engines on a regular basis.  Some of you already know this; it took me about a  year to figure it out!