Torrents as backlinks?

I was researching one of my competitors just now who's been doggedly holding on to his position since I've been watching my key word, somewhat shocked to discover that 99.9% of the backlinks that yahoo site explorer picks are torrents on Mininova!

To make matters even more confusing, I'd say at least 80% of those torrents have been removed...

I seriously wouldn't have expected these to offer so much weight, but seemingly they do! Anyone got any insight? (not going to risk running with this method personally on what I'm working on, but I might set up a .info to experiment at some point )

Well that's what I really don't understand the website I'm seeing these links on is nothing to do with grumble/jazz/scut/pron

They're all blatantly illegal torrents, hell most of them mention the website by name (but its nothing to do with Torrents....), it just seems insanely risky to me...

But on the other hand Torrent links to big movies are clearly going to be shared/linked to an awful lot in their short life span...

It's just something I've never seen mentioned on the forums before, and as is often the case on here I don't know if its because:
A) It works, and like most useful content on this forum has been moved to the VIP section
or
B) it doesn't work, hence no-ones talking about it

I can certainly see how they would be useful, but I never expected to encounter a site that was using them and nothing else ranking so well

Well that's unsurprising since torrents have been around for years too

I guess it does make sense that they'd be useful thinking about it, but I'm still a bit wary of doing so myself, and if the site I was researching is any indication they're only very short lived links...

I tried to use torrents for my main site, but it doesn't worked very well. Stick on the basis backlink techniques..that's what I suggest

Well for example you could try making some torrents which are not illegal or fake , like uploading some MRR stuff and so on with your website link in description... Then all the smaller sites scrape your torrent and you should have link back to your website quite easily. Haven't tried But now that its mentioned ill make one and point it to some random site of mine to see what happends.

well like I say I'm not tempted to use them myself It's worth noting though that all the backlinks were for torrents of high search terms like pirates of the carribean 3 .divx and stuff like that, I'd imagine you could accomplish something very simmilar with links placed in the description of video streaming sites... I do have to admit that I never bothered actually checking the sites with any software (seo quake can get a bit distracting after all), but I don't think any of the torrents had any page rank to speak of, and there weren't that many (Like I say I'm just confused, I don't see how these links can have so much weight when they just appear to be risky junk...)