General, non related links now account for nothing. Even worse top search engines like Google are banning sites using link farms to enhance their linkage. General link popularity programmes are considered spam and should be avoided at all costs. Well you could buy a host of domains, setup mini websites, link them together, submit and hope for the best. Or you could subscribe to a quality links service which provides related links to your site.
Related links is the key to top positioning and quality traffic.
Third generation search engines are only interested in quality related links. Each link is signed a weighting factor. Link trading or reciprocal linking, is a powerful web promotion strategy used to increase qualified traffic and improve link popularity . Trading links with other websites who share your target audience is critical to good website promotion and search engine positioning. While trading links is effective, it always took time, effort and persistence to find websites willing to trade links and then more time to manage the links.