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Associated Content (you won’t find a link for them in this article, and you’ll soon see why) bills themselves as the “The People’s Media Company.” Nice slogan, but dig a little deeper and you may be disappointed by the reality of the situation.
Lately I’ve been looking into alternative places to submit press releases. PRWeb is a my favorite source, but I am always wanting to keep options open. That’s how I came across AC. At first glance they looked pretty good. I ran across a story in the news about a researcher at UT Southwestern Medical Center who had found a mouse model that may help explain autism. Now I am guessing that UT Southwestern did not submit this press release to Associated Content, but rather that they slurped it from the UT site. Either way with my FireFox extensions turned on I was able to quickly see that the outgoing links in the release had been marked as rel=”nofollow”, so that any potential goodness for a linkback (the least AC could do for using the content in the first place was robbed from UT).
Now, I’ve never submitted a press release or article to Associated Content and I never will so why am I so steamed about what they’re doing? If they just nofollowed it, that would be one thing, but what they are doing is sticking links in the content to other pages on the Associated Content site. These are links that weren’t included in the press release in the first place but were slipped in by Associated Content. The Rain Main Mice release for example had a link where the words “United States” appeared naturally in the article to a completely unrelated article titled: “Is Free Trade Killing the United States? Myths of Free Trade Revealed.” Now clearly this is way off topic and hopefully it is caught by Google filters as nothing but a spam link, but imagine a press release on mortgage default and how AC could manipulate that story for lots of links back to other content on the AC site related to mortgages.
Clearly what Associated Content “The People’s Media” is doing here is little more than link spam - and worst of all - if you have ever submitted anything to them, they are using your hard work to do it.
