Forums are good to learn about almost everything really. If you join Webmasters forums, you can learn a great deal about Internet business, SEO and Webmaster issues.

Traffic building services, IMO, are effective for sites that rely on organic traffic heavily. It’s not effective for blogs, though.

Regarding ethical stand point, I see it as ‘black hat’ ethical – basically you play the search engine game that won’t affect the site visitors – site visitors will see your site is important if they think the content is useful, not on what ways you use to attract visitors.

Thanks for dropping by!

Google knows, I believe… but as long as it’s no hard evidence, Google, I think, will let such practice go… up until the next PR update… If by that time forums’ PR is penalised, like the recent PR penalty on web directories, we then know that Google don’t like such practice :)

Cheers!

Thanks for the comment – this blog, indeed, is being helped by the forum and blog poster.

So, thanks to you too, david! :)

Thanks for sharing your insight… and a good point you have on your cheese movies example :D

It’s sometimes hard to recognize whether a forum or blog poster or commenter is genuine or just do it because he/she is paid to post.

The good news is, visitors do like content – The returning visitors are those who see a forum or blog is ‘genuine and useful enough’ for them to socialise in.

Cheers!