Not every webmaster will need any link building service or link building automation tool to reach higher search engine ranking, so who did? If he is trying to rank high for a high competitive search term, a search term that not only bring high amount of results, but also the websites that rank in the first 2 results pages are very difficult to compete with. If you have the SEquak toolbar (and you must have) you can get most of the information about the websites that rank in the results pages, just search your keyword on google and see the results. The Page Rank and Alexa rank of the results. To compete with PR4 and higher websites will definitely require some hard work on link building and I don't see how anyone can do it manually. It's very important to know your competitors, how strong their websites are, and it is a good idea to try to learn how they build backlinks.
hmmmm, isnt this counter-productive? I thought Google have already stated that a massive surge in the number of backlinks is likely to set off red flags?