Google rankings

It also penalises sites that use advertising other than Google's own.

It contains a filter based on Ad space to copy ratios - sites with too much advertising get hit.

Now the naughty thing is that Google pays the best so someone suffering from panda does guess what? Removes the competitors ads!

Seems like anti-trust activity. Hence some at least of the hoo hah this has caused.

It penalized sites with only Google Ads on it in excessive manner. Low quality sites with duplicate contents and ads-heavy were penalized no matter which ads they are displaying.
Lots of Article directories were hit and they mostly had too much google ads on them.

As long as you stick to white hat SEO building links of quality and updating content regularly on your website or blog, you should avoid getting penalised by Google.

Also make sure you have done on page optimisation before you start link building because making on page changes later and changing between keywords can damage your SEO.

oh ok this is all very helpful thanks guys, i am going to start building these backlinks and i will try to do what has been suggested here. the article was very helpful btw. the problem i have now is deciding what will be considered quality content haha. thanks for all the help

Well creating backlinks using the following methods is the only way as to how your website would be able to maintain its ranks with in the search engine of Google. These methods for creating backlinks are by using the following activities.
1. Blog Post Writing
2. Bookmarking
3. Web Directory Submissions
4. Article Submissions
5. Forum Postings
6. Blog Commenting

Links are like virtual 'vote of confidence', search engines operate under the premise that a website must be good if lots of people are linking to (recommending) it. Follow this logic, the more links you have the higher up you will be on Google.

The quality of the link source matters even more. The logic is that a nobody's vote of confidence will not carry the same value as an endorsement from an industry expert. So if you can get links from well established websites related to your field, your ranking will climb more quickly.

Start with directory submission, it's easy and you can find lists of directories online. Once you've exhausted directories, you can try to find blogs related to your company/product/service and contact the blogger and see if they want to feature you in a post.

A couple of other things you should do regularly on a continuous basis is article submission and forum posting.

If you want to get ranking if websites on search engines then SEO is the best technique for building back links on high PR websites. If you want to get fast indexing of website then forum posting is the best. You can also use social bookmarking for getting high quality back links.

Hmmmm, the thread has been inactive for a year already. Perhaps its best to lay it to rest for now. I'm sure the OP has found the information they're looking for by now.