Friend's link building is the key factor to get ranking in search engine. Now google consider only quality links, i realized it through checking back links of site that come in top of the results. kapilver
Links have always been important for deciding rankings. Poor quality links never used to be valuable before also, and reciprocal links etc also gradually lost their value / quality in the past months, so this was expected.
Contact websites with good pagerank that are similar to your site but not exactly about the same subject. For instance if you have a site about kitesurfing you might want to link to a website about surfing in general.
Links is how google determines where you rank, getting lots of small quality links pr1-5 is the best!
thats the way it has been always. however, people always find backdoors to fool google and google itself gets smart over time as well. for example, when google came up with idea of ranking sites based on votes (how many sites link to you), some webmasters quickly figured out an easy way to get tons of backlinks which is by paying for them. lot of webmasters got their sites ranked very high by buying sitewide links. well, it didn;t take google to figure out that there was a hole in the algo, so they implemented LSI (Latent semantic indexing) in their algo on the Brandy update (i think it was Brandy, correct me if i'm wrong. its been few years) where only relavant links from sites in your niche will be counted. this made harder for all the webmasters who would look for easy way to get their sites ranked. so now, only relavant links should count toward ranking a site. but i have seen people still buying sitewide links and getting ranked way high, so looks like it does do some good if not as much as it used to be before.
Yeah it does work. My main competitor does it, but the site is so old, and so are the links that I think is why
link is second to the most important content in evaluating a site to rank in SE. SE check the quality of content and relevancy.