My story with seo and links started 6 years before when it was enough to get few inbound links pointing to your website with your keyword in the anchor text to rank among the top 10 in the SERP for some highly searched keywords. I was quite happy to find out about that and I saved no time to start building links toward my website and the search engine traffic spiked in a crazy manner.

It didn’t take thousands of webmasters a long time also to figure out that which make it harder and harder to rank well for competitive keywords and the few inbound links stop doing the job for you, it is now about hundreds or thousands. I kept expecting all that time that search engine will reduce its dependency on links as most webmasters are familiar now with the role of links in the SERP, but it looks it was very hard for search engine to find any good alternative (at least for the mean time), what search engines tried to do instead is to put strict guidelines to stop webmaster from manipulating this factor, Google was the leader in that as it changed the TOS page to clearly declare that buying links is a prohibited, it didn’t stop here, Google has added a form to report paid links.

Did that tell you anything? It is clearly tells that Google has failed to reduce the dependency on links in their algorithm (they have done a good job to decide the quality of inbound links) but they are going after those are trying to manipulate this factor. So there is no much changes, links still the most important factor in ranking websites but what changed is the way of getting them.
Google has good success in filtering some artificial link building technique algorithmically like:
1- Link exchange.
2- Blatantly paid links i.e links marked as sponsor, link cloud in the footer or the side bar of website.
3- Links from directories.
4- Links from network websites.

Many other sorts of artificial link building are being filtered by human interference like the report paid links form and other Google employees activities.

How to be ahead in the game:
You don’t need to wait until Goolge being able to filter all artificial link building technique (you can still bet on quick wins if you want), to be ahead in the game you need to go back to a very old seo statement “When it comes to search engine optimization content is king”, I know it is very hard to generate quality content but you can not maintain your good position for a long time without the good content, the good news for you with the internet connection getting faster and the machines/software getting more powerful content now going beyond the text, it is now:
1- Images.
2- Vides.
3- Widgets.
4- Audio
5- Games

ETC

Are you still not sure how will that drive links to your website? Ok I will explain it for #1 images; If you are reading blogs frequently you will see that bloggers are obsessed with images, most blogs will include one or more images and most of those blogger leave a link back to the source of the images with text like “Image Credit” “Image courtesy”.

So for now keep doing the artificial link building but if you think you want to stay in a good ranking for a long time in future then start putting your content strategy soon.

Inbound links upon their quality/relevancy/quantity still the main factor that control you site’s ranking with search engines, hover link building is the nastiest job in the seo process, it time/money consumer, you can spend as much as you want of time/money and still no guarantees for the results.Assuming you are new for the web and you still in the faze of investing your money on the web, you are building new websites to monetize or to promote your business, and you don’t want spend extra money on your link building campaign, here is some ways to do effective link building with zero money spending:

1- Assuming you do know about the business you are running, so you can write useful article about it, well then write 400+ word articles and go syndicate it on www.ezinearticles.com .. don’t waste time to syndicate it on hundreds of articles websites, you don’t need more links from duplicated document, besides many websites use www.ezinearticles.com content, so you will get your article distributed on hundred of websites just when you syndicate it on www.ezinearticles.com , take use of the contextual linking possibility and use some keyword in the third part of your article to link to your website. To check how many people publish your article on their website search Google for the exact title of your article (use “article title”), do that 10 days after www.ezinearticles.com approve your article.

2- Forums threads/signature, almost for any niche you will find a popular forum, in forums you can post links in your thread, you can also use your signature to include link to your website, relevant forum is good source for inbound links, just remember to be useful in your contributions not spammy.

3- Free directories, they still have some value, have a list of quality ones and start submitting your website, you can take use of some offers on forums to people offer free directory listing for free with a high approving rate such as the announcement category in Digital Point Forum

4- Links exchange, it has not died yet as many people telling, just be selective, mind the quality and relevancy and you will find good benefits in terms of traffic/ranking.

5- Ask for link (link begging), to do this you really have to have good content on your website this many webmasters on the web might be willing to link to it cause it really add value to their website, if your content is super good most likely you will get the links without asking for them, if they are just good it doesn’t harm to ask some webmasters to link to you, just remember to be polite, don’t use canned messages and finally don’t spam them.

If you do the five previous techniques on continues basis you will definitely witness an improvement in your ranking/traffic and the will work for you for competitive keywords not just for low competition ones (I hope you are not trying those techniques for terms like “car insurance” where nothing will help but spending hundred of thousands buying links)