Could you point me to where Google states what you said. I googled “natural links google” and also searched their TOS for the term “natural” and could not find anything that said all link building is evil? 

I did find this in their webmaster tools help:

“Keep in mind that our algorithms can distinguish natural links from unnatural links. Natural links to your site develop as part of the dynamic nature of the web when other sites find your content valuable and think it would be helpful for their visitors. Unnatural links to your site are placed there specifically to make your site look more popular to search engines. Some of these types of links (such as link schemes and doorway pages) are covered in our Webmaster Guidelines.Only natural links are useful for the indexing and ranking of your site.”This leaves a massive gap between natural and Unnatural links. Maybe we should call them contrived links ;-)It also states only natural links are used. So the contrived links are out. Does this mean any link in a directory, no matter how good and relevant that directory is has no link value if it is based on submitted requests? Maybe that’s a good idea. Any website that accepts requests for inclusion or allows self made content should not be allowed to pass link juice….maybe notIt’s good that Google tries to focus on the more natural links, but it’s not that easy in practice. Now to make some more natural comments somewhere else ;-)

Note the scale of shades of grey on the second slide? That’s what it is.

If you observe the rest of the presentation material you will see this is all about an organised attack on the link factors within reasonable limits of impact on the web quality and its users (avoiding things such as forum/blog comment spam, link buying, link farms, blog networks, hacking etc).

Business needs to survive, and for as long as Google lets one get away with it, others will be in an unfair position. Justice for all or none, that’s what the article says.

According to Google’s TOS, natural links are links others
point back to your site without the need to pay for it, ask for it,
comment for it or insert a link in your article to gain it. …..anything is else is manipulating search results. You can spin it anyway you like but all these self proclaimed “whitehat” SEOs are simply deluding clientele and themselves.

I don’t buy into the ”all link building strategies is black hat” idea. You could apply the same to “all website building” or “all copy writing” or any form of self promotion. All advertising and promotion work is designed to manipulate. 

Google guidelines tend to lean towards the idea that bad is when your doing it mainly to manipulate the search engines when you should be doing it to manipulate your visitors ;-)

I often read many posts where
SEO experts frown upon Blackhat strategies but then openly promote link
building. According to Google’s TOS, natural links are links others
point back to your site without the need to pay for it, ask for it,
comment for it or insert a link in your article to gain it.

So, if all link building strategies are in effect manipulating search
engine results, doesn’t it stand to reason that all link building is
Blackhat and the majority of off-page SEO practiced by SEO firms is in
effect, Blackhat?

Isn’t having an online business all about rankings, traffic and
conversions in the first place and search engine optimization should
essentially be a technical, and possibly not a moral or ethical issue?