Inbound links quantity and quality have been a major factor in sites ranking with major search engines especially Google throghout the last 5 years, is that going to be the same in 2008? The answer is yes but SEO services providers those focus all their SEO efforts on link building need to change their old mindset that links with the worse scenario will not harm a site, that has been changed recently, a reckless link building campaign might end up you website in Google sand box for ever.
Numerous creative link building techniques have been adopted by SEO consultant some of them are legitimate and many of them fall under the shady practice of SEO and those need to think more when and how to play in the shady area, yes links are still the main factor that decide your ranking but what changed is which links can help and which cannot, further more you need to know also which of them are harmful to your website and which are not, here is some tips to help you to build health links: - Do not go after quantity, quality matters more. You can use some factors like PR, crawling frequency and inbound links to find good resource of links. - Keep checking Google Webmasters guidelines for new rules (i.e. links exchange had been declared to be against Google TOS) - Inbound links might harm your websites, stop listening to those whom saying inbound links will not harm your website as they are beyond your control, actually they can.
SEO folks need to live with the reality that search engines evolve every day, if you need to stay in the game you need to evolve with the same rate or even faster.
Final advice, don’t put all the eggs in one basket (Google organic traffic basket), try to vary your traffic resources, try also to have more than one website for your business (each of them should have unique content)