I’ve been slacking off a bit on the SEO side of things and was approached by a company who offered to write some articles regularly and post each one on one of some sites they own. They showed me one of their sites (aboutaproperty dot co uk) and it’s basically a directory of articles they’ve written for different companies on various property-related topics.
Now, I know link farms have had their day, and I understand that article syndication sites are out but is this the same thing? Or is it just posting a single article with good content along with other well-written articles, and the benefit that comes from that. Does google consider such sites to be just for the purpose of providing links, rather than good user-targeted content?
Basically, is this kind of thing likely to help me and my site?
Any article given its own new page on a website is always going to have the same power as any other new page on a website (PR0), all things being equal. The root domain and other factors then come into play giving the links higher or lesser strength. I don’t think Google tags any of those sites as link dumps or article directories unless they are sufficient in size and regularly used by lots of people…
Evenso, syndicating your Articles to directories is not on the way out and never was on the way out. Article syndication still works and is extremely useful. What does carry less strength is doing mass article distribution to lots of directories for the sake of a link.
And not just because Google has devalued them, but because they’ve changed their algorithm and you have to be smarter about it. This means you need a lot more to see any movement, and you also have to vary your anchor text heavily, by 10+ keywords, including common indicators like Click Here. You then need to have several tiers linking to your higher value links to give them authority.
There’s more to do but again this method is just used to trick Google into your ranking your site, which whilst your site may be helpful, a lot of the links you put out are probably polluting the internet land 
I mean I have no problems with that because I provide linking solutions at a price so the more pollution the more jobs I get, but it does still work! But so does white hat backlink building if you have an interesting website that others are willing to share. Since I help people rank things like amazon review sites and adsense sites, usually they will not be interesting or unique enough to achieve natural backlinks and thus need help to rank and get traffic. That’s not to say that their sites aren’t helpful, but they just aren’t sites people are willing to link to or share socially.
So, as to give you my answer, I do think you should take the free Articles as they can only have a positive affect for you.