Link Building Exchanges ~ Good or Bad?

I've seen a few of these link building subscription sites where for $40 or $50 a month you can have a 3 way linking structure.

One site links to you -- you link to another... and another one links to the first one. This way you do not have reciprocal linking that Google supposedly does not like.

The question is -- do you always know the quality of the site linking to you using this Ménage à trois arrangement?

... and is really worth paying 30 to 60 bucks a month when you can do the same thing for free.

clipped from www.andrewdaum.com Link Building ~ the Holy Grail to High Search Engine Listings Or how about this one; utility poster video I’m #1 for that phrase in Google. I could go on and on, give you my most profitable phrases that I rank for — but I’d be messing myself up by giving you those phrases. Besides, the run my car on water phrase is a pretty good one. Whenever I write a post… I first think of the words or phrases I want to rank well for in the search engines. I write down the main phrase… then I write down three or four related phrases and use them though out the post (article). Once I’ve finished with the post, I let the post sit — I don’t link to it from anywhere or basically do anything with it for a few days. No promo at all. I want Google to find it here first — and Wordpress does a good job of that. If you want to cut your learning curve down a bit — (here’s the pitch), I have created a 40 page report on how I do it