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In a word, yes. Spend some time Googling around and analyzing backlink profiles in high spam areas (designer goods, pharma, etc) and you'll see tons of pages propped up by link spam ranking highly. If you are smart about it some automated link building tactics still work very well. It's not sustainable but most people take a "churn and burn" approach and just move on to a new domain if it gets torched by Google.

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Usually the linking scheme is more creative then what this article shows though. More tiers and not just linking to every site from every other site. For super competitive terms this still seems like a short term strategy but for less competitive it may still be viable.

I think google has taken steps to stop this from an algorithm stand point but really I think most of there attempts are more marketing based. IE trying to scare people into not doing it anymore.

It also doesn't take exploiting sites to do it. You can just buy some aged domains and throw up wordpress.

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