Nice post, agree with your points.

There are ethical ways of gaining links. what about paid links? Paid article and PR, do u think they are better than free once.

Because I do free article submission and meager amount of traffic i usually expect from them, my main intention behind this activity is to get back links.

But around 60 submissions of article has yielded 15 back links, rest is sort of waste, neither ended up in back links nor traffic. Have you ever maintained the data and the results. whats your thought on free article submissions.

Thank You,
Norma.