If they (temporarily) boost your rankings more traffic is directed to your site on all sorts of searches… but that doesn’t mean that the directee will stay more than a second or read more than a sentence.

And this is entirely different from refreshing links… which I try and do on a regular basis… but only in context.

You can definitely get some mileage out of them Arnold, especially if you use them the way you have.

I have to say though that I won’t be doing anymore straight link trains though, like Andy I prefer those that make you think a bit like the Blog Apocalypse or ‘5 blogs’ ones.

Links trains that point to your homepage are almost useless.

A link train pointing to deep pages on something that is relevant would be useful, though I am much more likely to respond to a meme that allows me to write some relevant content, though it might take me a while to pass it on.

I do agree re the “irrelevant” links and will gradually be adding some descriptive text to the faves train list. However, I was quite surprised to find that a lot of the “irrelevant” links aren’t really that irrelevant in the sense that I read a number of posts that I see from them when I login to my Technorati account. In fact, I’ve adopted quite a number of good ideas that I’ve seen for my own blog. There are around five or six from that list that I now read regularly yet would otherwise never have seen.

Anyone who just copies the trains is crazy for sure. I look through all those coming on but in practice have, so far, only had to delete two which were “adult content” sites (nothing hardcore, just less family-friendly than I think is wise to link to for a mainstream blog). I also err on the side of caution with foreign language blogs linking in: if I can’t read it, it ain’t getting linked to.