When I started learning all the stuff bout gaining links for SEO and traffic and what not. I started out by using automated links exchanges. They were very useful in gaining links and did get one of my sites to a pr 4. (sold it off ) I was just wondering whether they are stil half useful. Now that I have some money I am going to buy some of the one way packages some of these places offer and I really just want to know your view on these and if they could hurt my sites. Thnx.
I believe in paid PR7+ one-way links . I think PR1-4 paid links are waste of money unless it's a one-time fee for permanent link... Also, I think manual reciprocal link exchange, or 3-way link exchange with highly relative websites and having your link on their PR4-5 links pages help much too. I don't believe in automated link exchange websites.. they look like junky link farms made of spamming websites, and may harm your website.. this is known as "bad neighborhood"...
Also, I think that getting your website PR up to 4 is not a hard task.. not at all. While raising your PR up to 5 or especially to 6 is a quite hard thing..
I'm not agree with Automated link exchange its better to do manual link exchange and before you do exchange link try to read this New link Scheme of Google
All links, no matter where they are from, can help your site. That being said, they may not help very much. It's much more important that you have links from relevant sites. My website ranks higher than many of my competitors, even though I have fewer backlinks. The reason is because most of my backlinks (not counting those from forum posts ^_^) are from related sites.