Greg knows what he is talking about on this one. Proof? Here are the top 30 rankings for one site of mine that I started 2 months ago. All I have done is link pushing and then scrapebox blasts to the linkpush properties of about 50 links per property.
These are screen shots are from this morning and are all for the same site. There is no telling how many broad match keywords I have ranking. I can tell you that over the last 30 days there were visits via 152 different search phrases and of that only 19 were exact match.
I never publish my own articles, I let the system do it all. Sometimes the articles are completely off topic. I believe this to be good too as not all your links are coming from on topic pages. (just like the real world) I never add to or change the bio.
As you can see, for the most part they continue to climb or hold steady. The ones that you see dropping are the newer articles. The older the article, the steadier it is.
Even with all the issues that people were apparently having, the rankings have steadily improved.(I was seeing the same things that you were) 4 weeks ago there were only 5 top 10 rankings now there are 13. If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
Lets look at a non competitive keyword that I have on another site (2 weeks old) 1k exact searches a month.
1 My article on my site.
2 LinkPush Article
3 LinkPush Article
4 LinkPush Article
5 LinkPush Article
6 LinkPush Article
7 LinkPush Article
8 LinkPush Article
9 LinkPush Article
10 LinkPush Article
11 LinkPush Article
12 LinkPush Article
13 Wally world (WalMart)
14 LinkPush Article
15 LinkPush Article
16 LinkPush Article
17 LinkPush Article
18 LinkPush Article
19 TheDailyBeast.com
20 LinkPush Article
With the link pushes, I have successfully pushed all but those 2 sites back to the 3rd page. WalMart was #1 when I started.
If you do not get instant results, one of 2 things are happening... Your keyword is harder than you think it is or your site sucks. Could also be a combination of both of those. All my articles are 450+ words so if you are short on content, you will do poorly.
If you are doing poorly with link pushes, take another look at your site 2-4% density and 400+ words per article. Take another look at your keyword also. One of the two is what is holding you up. All of these articles have had at least 1 push and now I am going by search volume to push the higher searches up to the top. That will get more $$$ coming in to keep pushing the others and pay for more articles for more keywords. There are about 55 articles on this site.