It is definitely true that not all links are created equal. So many people overlook this when using certain tools to examine competition.

That is obviously a good read about link importance

As we all know, pagerank is an algorithm created by the founders of Google to estimate the importance of web pages. The basic idea behind the it is the fact that
a link (also called hyperlink or backlink) from page A to page B can be seen as a vote of trust from page A to page B. The higher the number of links pointing to a page, the higher its its rankings inside Google's search results.

Most people focus on getting external links, but they forget that internal links also pass link juice, and this is how you can create more valuable links within your websites.

4morereferrals, exellent post! Agree with all your points.
If a SEO guy would take and follow all these Google 'guidelines' honestly, then the top results for him in SERP would be somewhere in between 1000 and 100...000 page of search results.

Lol. Google is trying to make fools out of us all for years already by such kind of 'guidelines', but real experts really fool Google around by introducing new and innovative ways of link building.