Hey guys. I've been working on improving my ranking by increasing my backlinks considerably. I noticed that a high-ranking competitor of mine has tons of backlinks through blogs. The problem is that the blogs that write about my competitor's website are pretty ugly/generic and tend to post the same information. I am assuming that my competitor is paying for blog write-ups and that the blog owners have about 30-50 blogs where they post the same information.
1. Am I correct in my assumption or is there something I am not understanding?
2. Do search engines in any way frown on this activity or lower your ranking if you get caught?
3. If this is a good technique, how do I do it because it seems to be working for my competitor?
Thanks in advance