After every algo update people start speculating what part of SEO has been hit this time around and more often than not everyone figures "hm, it must have been profiles, THIS TIME they have been finally devalued!". A few weeks later, they turn quiet again as they realize profiles still work.

Google isn't penalizing you for building these kind of links, or it would be easy to just send a couple thousand links at your competitors and get them penalized, de-indexed or what not.

Yeah, This kind of links not penalize in google. Many webmaster has used profile link for back links. So not worried about it and keep continue work process on your site.

I would ask you to try them for yourself instead of relying on some people's advice who may not have tried them at all.

They don't make much sense but they definitely boost rank on a regular basis.

Whether they are effective or not, I don't know for sure because I never tried them at all.

But...

I have seen many top ranking (number 1) websites ranking solely due to 20-30 profile links.

Most of these sites are targetting product name keywords, e.g. Micro Niche Finder and Micro Niche Finder review. (example only).

What did I do?

I analyzed these websites.

I found that they varied their anchor text a lot. There are as many as 10 - 15 variations for the anchor text.

Besides, they seem to backlink to their profile links (backlinks) too, with blog comments and what not.

Yes, they are effective, but only if used properly:

http://www.warriorforum.com/adsense-...backlinks.html