They used to be effective.. not so much now! I frankly wouldnt waste time & money manually creating unique content to post to directories. A better strategy is to create awesome content and approach other blog owners & ask to guest post your content (don't overdo it, though!) Az
yes. senuke with latest version of xcr is a legendary software for seo. along with xrumer and scrapebox. go google it and you will find a lot info for this software.
yes. i do use senuke. but if u still doubt that your site banned from google.. u can use it on 2nd and 3rd tier backlink.
Ive found that article marketing only really works for my lower comp niches that the articles can actually have a chance of ranking for.. you'd be surprised what an o'desk writer and ezine / streetarticles can do for a low comp niche cpa site
Google wants to penalize blog post links, so be on the lookout for that as well. I personally prefer blog posts to article directories. The latter often syndicate content and that's too bad >>> Google penalty... Unique blogs can have high quality content, real readers that will actually come across your site. This can also help in the SERPs. Overall, I'd focus primarily on creating quality articles for my sites.
I think better to work on your authority blog producing high quality content, share it to social media to get targeted traffic.