Link popularity plays a major role in higher ranking in Google's SERPs. The other traditional link strategies such as directory submission, blog commenting, social bookmarking sites and others have little effect to a site. Google now knows that those links are webmaster generated and it gives a little or of no value at all, especially blog commenting.
My entry possesses less than a hundred links as of this time and some competitors have already amassed thousands of links. But there are many sites with thousands of links that are still ranked below me. The reason of this is the quality of the links they possess. They may have the quantity, but their quality is low that's why even of they have a lot more links than mine, they are still ranked below my site.