Article use and Submission

[C French]

I was just now reading a article at Article City by Janice Byar. I have seen site's whose content mostly consist of articles from ARA & Article City who have good PR. I've often wondered how a site with no original content could score so high with the SE's. I see many sites that use these articles for content.

Here's what Janice Byar had to say.
"Search engines take a dim view of content that is used in numerous websites. They can consider this as spamming so they tend to drop the placement of such websites or completely eliminate them from the search engine".

With so many people using these articles, how could they be beneficial to your website and wouldn't you fall into the category of the quote above? Also if you submit content from your site as a article for publication, wouldn't the wide use of the article put you into competition for your keyword ranking?

[fathom]

2 problems with that thinking

1. the design "shell" is also content "not just text" thus most design are unique enough to avoid penalty.

2. Article repositories tend not to link to each other thus there is limited "direct relationship" between them.