Backlinks with Related Blogs Plugin?

I was doing some research on how a website received backlinks to his website and I saw that a bunch came from autoblogs which had a "Related Blogs" section on the bottom. Here is an example:


I might be blind, but I searched in google for a related blogs plugin, but none seem to come up. Is this from a service that is offered from a place like Unique Article Wizard (UAW)?

Also I was wondering which article directory was used for these articles on these websites for them to be picked up by autoblogs?:


I wanted to find out which article directory was used because I don't like it when it lists the "Article Source" like this autoblog which clearly shows its from articlebase:


I just started researching how to create back links and other "off site" seo methods just recently. Any help would be appreciated, thanks guys.

Here is a "related websites" plugin for wordpress.


The second article you quote comes from ezine articles. Looks like the webmaster just copied the article and changed the title.

Thanks for the related websites plugin link

I've been testing different article directories and have over 40 articles in EZA surround 1 niche. None of them have been picked up by an autoblog. So you think some people are just copying articles and leaving in the hyper links from the authorbox on the bottom?

I'm working on 2 websites right now, both have similar search numbers and roughly the same competition on google.

The first website, I started to create backlinks from various places and submitted my blog posts to article directories and used onlywire (this is the first time I've ever done this), and I was dumb and forgot to 'spin' the article. A lot of autoblogs picked up my article from one article directory. I ranked #8 in google for a keyterm that has a Monthly Search of 29,640 and has 18.3 million indexed pages according to Keyword Elite (I have a paid version not a cracked one). I also ranked on the first page of google for many other smaller searched terms. However, a week later none of the terms were ranked in google. Do you think my website got penalized for duplicate content from Google because I didn't spin the articles?

The second website I've been working on has 21,870 monthly searches with 1.7 million indexed pages. I hadn't been seeing any results with google webmaster tools, and just forgot about the website (it has about 20 pages in it). Today (December 23rd) I checked it and it was ranking well for many keyterms. I have created 1 back link for this website and it is still ranking well for many terms & sending me quite a bit of traffic.

So, do you think creating back links via article directors, and other properties is worth it? Because my second website seems to be doing well with no back links.