This paper focuses on the motion planning problem for serial articulated robots with revolute joints under kinematic constraints. Many motion planners leverage iterative local optimization methods but are often trapped in local minima due to non-convexity of the problem. A key reason for the non-convexity is the trigonometric term when parameterizing the kinematics using joint angles. Recent distance-based formulations can eliminate these trigonometric terms by formulating the kinematics based on distances, and has shown superior performance against classic joint angle based formulations in domains like inverse kinematics (IK). However, distance-based kinematics formulations have not yet been studied for motion planning, and naively applying them for motion planning may lead to poor computational efficiency. In particular, IK seeks one configuration while motion planning seeks a sequence of configurations, which greatly increases the scale of the underlying optimization problem. This paper proposes Propagative Distance Optimization for Motion Planning (PDOMP), which addresses the challenge by (i) introducing a new compact representation that reduces the number of variables in the distance-based formulation, and (ii) leveraging the chain structure to efficiently compute forward kinematics and Jacobians of the robot among waypoints along a path. Test results show that PDOMP runs up to 10 times faster than the sampling-based and angle-based-optimization baseline methods.