I don't get what this article is about.  I don't see an answer to the qeustion "How To Help Clients Through Link Building Confusion?" He goes on about speaking at SMX then asks a bunch more questions that are not answered.  At the end he just says most link builders don't know anything and should send work to somebody who does.  I suppose that could be an answer to the question but not a very good one.  He also talks about how every site should have a custom link building stratagy.  This is good advice but still does not answer any of the questions.

I don't think you ever could answer this quetion.  If your link builder does a good job and gets you links and you start ranking for your terms then that is a good link builder.  Other than that there is no way to know.  You really can't go by price becuase I have heard stories about people paying a ton of money and never ranking for anything.  I have also seen the real cheap guys get people to rank.  I have also seen both get sites penalties.

Google is partially to blame because they don't punish sites very often.  Danny and Jill have both written lately that they are just fed up with Google doing nothing about spammers.  You can hire a black/gray hat link builder and do very well and never have any problems and you can hire a white hat link builder and get a penalty or the other way around.  There is confusion because Google is confusing.