Sadly yes some of this does work, but you have to buy the tools and resources promoted by these sorts of sites, most of which would only seem to have experience using them to market SEO tools to other wannabee web marketers. The search engines are getting smarter though as you say, and depending on these sorts of techniques is asking for trouble.
Same with buying links from private blog networks and similar, Google is cracking down on this but people are still using links from vast blog networks and ranking well today.