Thanks for the reply!
That is indeed what I meant. The way it is being explained is that the websites pointing at your website are 'clean' websites that have gained rank by the other websites pointing to the second tier and then all the spammy and automated links pointing to the second tier.
Like you said it did sound too good to be true, but when reading the comments on his blog and other blogs it seems that is a successful method to get your website ranking within a few months.
I try to stay away from black hat SEO as far as I can, but it is just very disheartening sometimes to see my competitors ranking their websites while clearly using black hat SEO.