I purchased 4000 links to my site about 9 months ago, was getting good traffic, and the service removed my links for non payment (they claim they sent me the bill, but I never got it) anyways, my links dropped out for about 3 months. Now they are answering my emails saying they still have my links list, and just need to reactivate them. Will I still get the credit for the links age, or will I have to start all over again? Thanks, RonMo
no one knows for sure. I'm personally not of the opinion that the age of the links plays as big of a factor as the age of the site itself; if you have a very old, established, trusted site, you could point 4,000 links at a new page with a specific keyphrase in mind and probably rank for it within a week. if you were seeing an ROI by buying the links, renew the service. if you weren't, don't.
Has Google shown any of those links in your back links during the recent links update? If they have started showing in your backlinks, Google will consider them. What could cause a problem is all these 4000 new links coming to your site. Google might penalize them and detect that these were paid links as they came all of a sudden, and thousands of them, and then got removed also. Thats the main reason why most sites do not see an update in Google PR because of links bought on high PR sites/pages.
I wouldn't assume that if it doesn't show in a google backlinks search that it's not helping you. I have some pages that show absolutely zero backlinks on google yet rank well for pretty competitive stuff. then again, the game is completely different when you're using a trusted / unsandboxed domain versus a new / not trusted / sandboxed one.