Have you only created web 2.0 sites, and blasted them? You need to build different types of links.
Personally, I'd buy some high PR blog posts, as I've found those work GREAT.
ummm lol
I'm in a niche right now that has "<keyword>" in quotations of 8.7 million, 230k searches/mth and top spots rake in >4 million USD/yr
I'm now #16 (after a loooot of work)
Let me tell you, the PR7, PR6, PR5 backlinks I have (when you count all of them there's over 200 d0follows) did less for the site than the automated, though difficult web 2.0 pyramids I made.
There's over 1000 PR3+ d0follow links pointing to the site now with <30 OBL... which is a
ton more than anyone else in this niche. I think the #1-#5 spots have <50 PR3+ links pointing to them.
It frustrates me when everyone pretends PR links are worth the ridiculous rates charged.
I've only seen 1-2 examples where someone did this successfully. The sites were old, and they purchased over 1500 permanent homepage links.... this site is ranked #8 in this particular niche, which does show the power of such links, but the links were mostly shitty honestly. My guess is he is spending $5000-10,000/mth for them.
Sadly I'm not convinced that blogposts vs d0follow comments actually matters in the end to the ranking bot. Especially PRless blogposts (ie. what you get when you buy them)
I have found that if you do pyramids right, that they have more power per link than any BP or Homepage contextual link does.
My site shows a mere 1700 backlinks in Majestic, most of the web 2.0s don't show up there. And the site is outranking a lot of sites with 50-60k links, even with decent, white hat, ezine based strategies.
Now that I have the capacity to do 1000-1500 web 2.0s with video embedding every single day (rather than the 50 or so I did previously, at best), I expect the site will soon move to the top 5 without much hassle.
This was done
free as far as, the site does not pay monthly fees to someone to give it homepage links.
Even in this niche that is worth so much, it's a very large burden to shell out $10k/mth with no assurance of ranking (in fact several sites that tried this, were severely sandboxed)