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Some ezine article links are indeed followed.  This can cause problems, because some websites can have, say 9 nofollowed links from ezine article pages and then the 10th is followed.  As such, many people miss those. That's great that your article marketing didn't hurt you, but this is exactly the type of link that can hurt others in the eyes of Penguin. Adam, it's good that you got the articles removed.  You may also want to do a search for the text of these articles in case someone has taken them and republished them as these will be unnatural links too. If you do find additional article links that you can't get removed, just disavow them.  Make sure you do so at the domain level.