The inbound links have been the major factor that decides your website position with the major search engines especially Google, so all SEO services were going around the link building process. Countless creative link building methods have been adopted by SEO consultant some of them legitimate and many of them fall under the shady practice of SEO.

Does links still the major factor that major search engines still use to rank websites or things changed? Yes links are still the main factor that decide your ranking but what changes is which links can help and which cannot and you can go farther with your thinking to say something like 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 listing to those saying inbound links will not harm your website as they are beyond your control, actually they can.