Article Submission, is it Spam?

[iJeep]

When looking at my competitors in Open Site Explorer, I see that most of them have hundreds of links from articles that are meaningless to a human with one or two links to their site using keywords in the last paragraph.

My guess is that these companies used an article creation/submission service since the article isn't 100% related to the link, but it is close.

Should I do this as well?  Is it spam?

All of these sites rank higher than me for all terms and have higher scores in the competitive analysis.

[SparkplugDigital]

I think that you can get a bigger boost to your site's authority if you focus on getting links from guest posts on relevant blogs with good domain authority than if you get links from a lot of low quality irrelevant sites. I believe that Google discounts links from article submission sites that have been abused in the past.

[kennyrowe]

If it's meaningless for humans, it's spam to get them to rank higher. And I would suggest not using services like they have simply because Google has been going after sites who employ content farms for links. Instead, create quality, for-human content that promotes your niche. As dvtruong pointed out, doing guests posts on other quality sites is a great way to get links. You can also work partnerships out with other sites. Or use other 'white hat' ways to build your links. Eventually, your links will be of higher quality and thus, higher value to Google compared to your competitors. They will eventually get stung for using content farms.

[junioruf]

I agree with dvtruong and Erica; doing guest posts on relevant sites is a good way to get links. It seems as if your competitors are doing a little black hat, which is never good and Google will catch up with them.