I've had several high PR links I was paying for, probably about $400 per month. Rankings were pretty good for the most part. But I've canceled most accounts.
You have
a) crap PR sites that aren't even quality PR sites, Google for whatever reason gave them PR.
b) crap PR sites that were probably faked, but network owner was so excited to get the PR6 for so cheap they didn't take the time to see if it's actually quality.
c) links you don't even know where they are because owner doesn't give out the links.
d) your links with 99 other links, on some poorly spun article
e) probably been deindexed or devalued, as it's fairly easy for Google to spot these networks. Let's face it about 90% of all link networks cap out at 100 links. How easy would that be to narrow down and find.
I think with several quality tiers there is no reason why 2.0s can't replace 'high pr homepage' links.
Just to be clear,
These are PR sites I made have PR2-PR4, they are not fake as a result, they are not "crap" they have only my site's links out of them and several of them have gone up in PR, not dropped (I mean my personal network of around 90 sites).
I'm talking about PR links you pay for like from high PR society, or article ranks, etc. giving disappointing results.
Anyway I have had poor luck in my hyper competitive niches with them, but I think the problem is I need to run web 2.0 pyramids linking to THOSE articles, and see where it goes (this is what I'm doing now)
You're absolutely right about several quality tiers replacing them, however, the quality tiers is something I'm still struggling to automate as AMR is next to worthless now. What I've been doing instead is dumping tons of PR ******** links from bookmarks to them + scrapeboxing those bookmarks + sliq submitter to each subdomain + xrumer with scrapebox linking to the xrumer blasts as well. I also, just for full disclosure, do not use merely the 2000 directories that come with sliq. I think I have around 7000 now.
It's working out well, but the time frame to see the results is weeks out from when you complete each blast, vs these "paid" article directories which you can see modest results fairly quickly.
Also, just to be clear, I manually created 1500 PR3+ links (all d0follows), with a lot of PR6 and several PR7/PR8 links in there as well to a site of mine not long ago. The site didn't even budge more than 5-6 spots (granted this keyword is like ranking top 5 for "forex trading" but still) ... the OBLs on each page were <40... most of them I was the first comment.
When I did this, and saw poor results from the effort, it makes me seriously question the sanity of shelling out tons of money for hmpg links each month. I basically created 1500 permanent high PR links, without paying a dime... those links would have cost a small fortune each month (at least $5k/mth)
Web 2.0 pyramids work, but it's a lot of hustling and I'm always disappointed with the results. I guess I'm not pushing out links fast enough. The results are much, much better than high PR networks I've tried though...