Link to those that link to you? Worthwhile?

[iAnalyst.com]

We have thousands and thousands of sites that link to a domain we are working on, many with low page authority and high domain (bloggers, forum posts, etc). Has anyone experimented with linking to the pages that link to you (not from your site) but from other means in an effort to boost their quality?

I'm not sure what method we would use, maybe some relevant blog comments or social votes. But curious if this could be an effective method.

[RyanKent]

Has anyone experimented with linking to the pages that link to you (not from your site) but from other means in an effort to boost their quality?

What benefit does this activity have for users? None.

When you focus your efforts on activities that do not offer any benefit to users, but instead the primary focus is to manipulate search results, it is called Black Hat SEO. This activity is establishing a link network. Search engines such as Google are very aware of this method and, when you are caught, your site will receive a penalty.

I would recommend focusing your time and effort on activities which benefit visitors.

[irvingw]

Since link building is a very time consuming process, you would be better concentrating on getting people to link directly to you.

If you get a link to a site that links to you, the PR from that original site is distributed equally among all the links on that page and you only get a very small fraction of that PR being passed to your site, so it's really not worth it.

That being said, links for the sole purpose traffic are completely legit, while links intended to manipulate search results are are not recommended at all.