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Hey Diane,

Google will rarely penalize a site for it's inbound links. Otherwise it would be too easy for black hat SEO's to get their competitors penalized out of the SERPs. So it is unlikely that the free article sites will damage your SEO reputation.

But it may damage your reputation with Humans, the reputation that counts. Your articles should help to establish your position as an expert in your line of business, sounding like a 2 year old probably doesn't help.

Best thing is to get in contact with reputable blogs or sites in your niche and see if they will run your articles. Or else put the articles on your own site and promote them there to build your traffic up.

Outspoken Media has a good article on promoting your own content, should you be interested:

http://outspokenmedia.com/online-marketing/how-to-promote-good-content/

I have a site I launched a few months back, and the niche isn't all that competitive.

After a bit of work the domain is now sitting near the bottom of page 2 on google but it's number 2 in yahoo search.

I have been manually building the links but they are all targeted to just one keyword, and mainly have the same link text. Will this look suspicious to google, and should I be spreading my anchor text over different keywords?

Or is the reason Im ranking so well in yahoo be because they are just picking up more backlinks? 23 from yahoo but only 9 from google.