How does a massive link program work?

[philking]

Can someone give me the "bottom line" on getting the huge volumes of links many sites I analyze with "SEO Elite" show?? Some of these small sites (but they are small sites that I know have used an SEO service to help them) have like 1000+ links into them. As I understand it, you can use an "auto email tool" to "shotgun" email a big set of sites/directories/etc and ask for inclusion in their links (and offer to put them in yours); but I have read on several sites that their admins consder this spam and they really don't like it (and they say they will not list/link to you if you do it). But, at the same time, I really can't believe that someone(s) (even at a paid SEO consulting company) sat down and manually entered these sites (with 1000+ links into them) into these 1000+ sites/directories/etc. How does this really work??

Thanks,

Phil

[philking]

Apparently you use one of the many "auto assist link submitter" products which finds link submission pages for keywords and then assists in filling them out.

Phil