article submission and duplicate content

[Homer4Bama]

I have been rather blasé regarding this issue. (Especially since reading multiple different takes on whether or not a duplicate content penalty could be assessed on your own articles.)

Something irked me, so I did a test.

I created an article and posted it on my website. After my site was crawled, I was on page 1 for the topic. (not a very competitive term, but I did get a lead off the page )

I then posted the entire article to an external blog. No changes in content what-so-ever. The external page was indexed and bumped my site out, taking over my page 1 ranking.

Lastly, I submitted the same content to ezine. Ezine bumped out the blog , but left my site still out in the cold.

This has forced me to come up with a new plan for my article submission and blogging strategy....

So here's what I am thinking.....

Create my nice little area / city / neighborhood specific articles for my site alone.

Then....

Create and submit a "generic" or non-area specific version that will compliment the article on my site, but not jeopardize my local content. Although not specific to my area, the article still needs to hold merit, and not be just using a thesaurus to get a 1/3 change and taking out the city references.

What I am hoping for is that I get the best of both worlds. My site does well locally, while my articles get indexed in generic or more general queries....

Thoughts?