Step 1. Collecting "Articles" URLs. Part 1

I am not sure yet if any of those "Articles" sites are used as a "free content" sources. Will check that later. Most of the articles I saw so far were written with the only one purpose: having a link to your website from a page with the content related to yours. Looks like today's SEO. Similar to "doorway pages" popular years ago.

Let's see.

I am starting with www . GoArticles . com just because I saw it once, and because the site looks nice and professionally done (not discussing the content here, just look-n-feel).

Chose a random article. Saw immediately that the article is a "paid advertisement" done by a freelance writer. Short text with three links having a specific phrase.

The links go to "www . [SomeSite] . com"
Let's see if those links are recognized by search engines, and what other links point to the same site.

I will use Yahoo this time and not Google. Google is a "funny beast" when it comes to the links. It shows some of the links. I'll come to that later. For now - let's go to Yahoo and search for

link:http://www . [SomeSite] . com -site:www . [SomeSite] . com

Received 15 thousand links!!! I doubt they all were done manually...
I am going to write down all the URLs from the first N pages and try to analyze them.

To be continued...