Won't submitting articles to article directories penalize your own site? (assuming you have your articles posted on your site)

How does this work?

And what's the benefit of writing your own articles for your site when you can just take a "free article" and use that?

Edit: LINKS belong in your signature

Usually when I do article submission, I do not submit articles that I have published on my own site. the idea of article submission is to submit the articles to the article sites in order to entice people to come back to your site to buy a product or service you are offering. It can also help with Google PR, since it provides viable back links.

As for it penalizing you if you were to post it on your site as well. I don't think it would hurt all that much. Most likely as long as your site has a ok PR to begin with, Google will view the submitted articles as the dup content, and not the article on your site. The very worse that will happen is that the one page on your site with the article won't rank high. It should not affect the rest of your site.

Usually, google penalize sites that has the duplicate content. On your example, you are submitting an article that appeared, indexed, and declared to be your original piece, so whomever site that has that copy of the same article will be the one in red spot on google's watch list. There are also numerous write ups stating that google penelizing duplicate content is false. It's stated there that a minor revision and/or own words insertion on the copied content will look original on crawlers eyes.

Surfers are always on a search for fresh and new content. If you build a site with content taken from free article achieve (no revision at all), your site will appear just another duplicate site and probably you'll loss numerous potential sales, drop conversions, and lose visits.