I would say for me, I experince 2, 3 and sometimes 4 month cycles in both updates, submissions and link activation
if you have
www.mysite.com
and expect that a gate named
www.mysite.com/gatepage1.html 2.html etc is going to increase your link popularity, I would say not much, because it is linking from the root domain
if you get links from
www.bobs-site.com and
www.anothersite.com and so forth, that is what will count as link popularity
it's really nice to play with auto submission programs and automatic gate page makers, but once you learn the trade, a good hand built page, often has the random elements necessary to give you an astoundingly high rank
