Automated link exchanges

A while ago I registered to an automated link exchange service, to check if this is a good way to promote my sites.

So I registered through link vault which seems to be the best of those services.

Unfortunatelly, when I check the pages that are supposed to have links back to my site, I see nothing!

So they are not checking for cheating, because if they do there would not be so many cheaters in their network.

Assuming to all of these, I will not signup again to such a service.

Do you have any experiences with programs like that? What is your opinion?

You are right Nicolas.

The fact is that they don't 'catch' people who finally stop using the service, so the new members that check their back links are dissapointed, so they quit too.

Another bad thing about these automated link exchanges is the danger to get banned from search engines.

Here is a nice resource on this topic : http://link-exchange-info.com/

Yes this doesn't look like a very good promotion technique.

ehh...you can get banned from google for it?

No you don't get banned but it will give you a penalty. But even if you wont get penalty let me tell you another reason.
When you have a new site with a few incoming links, Google will index all of them.
Now in order to avoid search engine spamming, if you have a lot of links pointing to your new site, those links will be counted as valid after a few months. When you use automatic link exchanges, all of your links will come from pr 0 pages. Instead of this you can try to get 1 or more high pr links and you are done