If your site isn’t fully indexed and spidered often, placing your articles there can be a waste of time as they won’t show up in the SERPs.
When your site’s young, it’s much better to submit your articles to article directories, but ensure that the article is just a ‘teaser’ that will bring traffic to the actual content on your site.
As article directories are authority sites, your article will get indexed much quicker and show higher up in the results, hopefully bringing traffic to your site via the resource box. And if one or other directory gets penalised because of duplicate content, it’s not your concern – so long as the article isn’t duplicated from your site content.
If you type the phrase ‘Can you trust online casinos’ into Google, the top two results are for article directories, but both show my article. The article is (hopefully!) interesting, but sufficiently vague so that visitors reading it come through to my site for further info. I’ve had loads of clicks from that one article and possibly a number of players. But as none of the article content appears on my website, I don’t incur any penalties.
So my advice is to write articles that act like adverts, bringing targetted traffic to your site on the back of the article directories’ good rankings.
Hope that helps.