There are only a few ways to obtain backlinks:

1. Making good link-bait (although this could be seen as on-page optimization which, in a sense, it is. This depends on who you’re talking to).
2. Building phony sites (or blogs) that link to the site you want to rank well in the SERPs.
3. Submitting to directories.
4. Begging webmasters on your bare knees for a link to your site.
5. Being part of a “top secret society” of other SEO people/webmasters.

1. Making good link-bait is the only thing I don’t hate about link building. The content of your page is 100% yours to decide.
2. Building phony sites for the sole purpose of increasing the number of links pointing to a site is a very time consuming task. Another bad thing is your brand new site(s) have little or (probably) no Trust. The good thing about it is you can control the link flow. You can also control the relevance (topics) of these kind of sites.
3. Submitting to directories is pretty pointless these days in terms of organic search engine rankings. Ever since Google made it clear to us that they don’t like those kind of tactics they started to decrease the importance of those links, they even started to penalize sites that used paid links. This stirred up a debate in the SEO sphere where some thought it was good and some thought it was bad. I’m somewhere in between as I think it’s both. The good thing is it’s good for the user, search results can’t be (well, that’s…) tampered with this way. The user won’t have to take as much crap as if it was possible. The bad thing is it can be compared to advertising, and what’s wrong with advertising? What’s the difference between an ad in the paper and a #1 position in the SERPs? Here’s where the gain is for the search engines; instead of paying an SEO firm to get them to the top, the poor little “contestant” has to pay the search engine for an ad, and research say (haven’t done any myself) users are less likely to click an ad than the #1 spot.
4. Begging webmasters for a link to your site is the most humiliating form of link building I know of. It’s just not good for your self-esteem, something I’ve only done like 5 times in my life. And if you take into account the “ROI” you get it’s just not worth it.
5. Being part of a “top secret society” where everybody helps everybody else is the most convenient and efficient way of getting backlinks, a very efficient way. I’ve seen some of those guys have more than 50.000 backlinks! And these are non-commercial sites that only the SEO community know about! The problem is how to make the “society” accept you as one of them. I wish you the best of luck (depending on what business you’re in). 

Now for some fun stuff and an example of a great link bait; the SEO Wars. It’s so good I’ll even link without the nofollow

In this test I’m trying to see if giving #2 some link juice from a couple of “old” bs websites (they’re about five years old and their sole purpose back then was SEO (and still is), let’s group them together and call them “#3″) and then redirecting that juice to #1 would do any good for #1 compared to linking directly from #3 to #1, kind of like one big single pointer instead of many small pointers. Before I started the experiment #3 had been pointing at #1 for years, but with a different anchor text. So, #3 links to #2 and #2 links to #1, and I want #1 to be the winner. I’ve used word#1 and word#2 for anchor text all the way from #3 to #1 (of course).

One aspect of all this is that #1 is a twelve year old website with a fair amount of trust (never been banned or anything), but with low Pagerank (2). I dare say it has a fair amount of trust since it has low PR but still gives a good boost to a website your linking to. By boost I mean “making another website rank better by linking to it”. So I guess Trust is what we’re talking about here.

Summary:

• #1. Old website, low PR, good Trust.
• #2. New website (about six months), low PR, probably no Trust.
• #3. Semi-old website, low PR, Trust unknown.

What I’m seeing is that #2 is ranking slightly better than #1. Not by much, but better (they’re both on page two at the moment). So what kind of conclusion do I draw from this?

Well, it seems to me that Trust is considered just as important as PR, from a search engine perspective, when it comes to boosting but isn’t worth much when it comes to ranking either.

So, Trust=Pagerank? I sure can’t see any difference when it comes to boosting other websites. Age=Trust? That’s something I’d like to know…

Well, back to the original question. Does one big pointer give more of a boost than many small pointers? In this case I’d have so say no. But there are questions. Here’s one:

What would have happened if #2 had the same age as #3? Would the links (#3 consists of more than one website, remember?) from #3 to #2 give #2 more power to boost #1 than all the links from #3 to #1 separately?

I’m sure there’s something I’m forgetting here but I’d love for you to comment on this.

Speaking of Google, my theory about Google and their attempt to dominate the world just got another boost. How do you like it when Matt Cutts first is on Google’s payroll and then, after a few years, on Performics (an SEO company)? Hmmm, let me get this straight: Google hires Matt Cutts > Google buys Performics > Matt Cutts then starts working for Performics as their no 1 SEO guru. On top of all this they say they won’t offer their SEO services to anyone spending less than $1.000.000 a year on AdWords.

First you buy $1.000.000 worth of AdWords from us, THEN we can start talking SEO!

Their halo just took another hit…

Where will this end?