Lots of speculation on how effective all those tiers are compared to the work involved in building them. Basically there are three reasons for the web 2.0 properties. First to insulate your site from "low quality links", the thinking is that you can send all your lower quality links to these secondary sites which will clean them before sending them to one of your money sites. Second is since these pages are already on high PR sites that already have a huge number of links you should be able to send links to them at a faster rate than your own brand new domain thus getting a higher PR quicker. You also get some benefit from the PR of the main site. Third is you get some link diversity in your link profile. If you use all profile links then adding links with content like web 2. pages and articles on the article sites will mix things up a bit. You are also getting links with lots of links of their own unlike say profile links. The idea is that these pages will end up with PR of their own and both look more normal and pass that PR strength to your site.
The idea of the pyramid is to make that bottom site even stronger. You build two or three layers with all of the links funneling down to one page that you link to your money site. Should this work? Yes, basically you are building yourself a high PR page that leads to your site which is always a good thing. Like anything else you need to balance the ROI of both your time and money. Does it work well enough to spend all the time and money to build the page up? Only you can decide how that balances out for you. I have built a few with three tiers and honestly with all that is involved it is just easier for me to buy a PR 3 or PR4 site that already has all those links and link it to some of my sites. Better ROI on my time and money. If you have the time and not the money then your decision is going to be different.
Like anything you do for your business you have to keep the ROI in mind every time you either spend money or start a task. How is that time or money you are spending going to improve how much money you are making. Everything that you do for your business need to be looked at as an investment because that is what it is. Will it result in more cash? If so how much? Is that number high enough to make the investment in my time and money? Everything you do has to be looked at through the prism of ROI.
