Google still sees linking as the greatest way that they can determine relevance and link-building will be around for awhile. Here are ways you may not have thought of to build some great links for your site:

Short post tonight as I'm just back from a short trip with Mystery Guest to celebrate our one year anniversary (which was awesome, BTW) and need to get caught up on lots of email.

Tonight I'm tackling a contentious, thorny issue and that's always a tough task. Thus, I'll ask, up front, for a bit of leeway in how my words are parsed and interpreted. I'm happy to make clarifications on specifics in the comments.

Lately, we've been getting a lot of questions (through Q+A as well as from clients and the SEO community) about the practice of buying links. A good number of folks have pointed out that, years ago, I endorsed several text/paid link brokers - companies that aggregate link ad inventory and sell it to those seeking to boost their rankings. This practice does violate Google's Quality Guidelines as well as other engines' desires, as do most of the direct forms of paying money to get a link that will assist with organic search rankings (I say "most" because the Yahoo! Directory and a few others like it may be exempt).