caine - 1:22 am on Jun 7, 2002 (gmt 0)

dependant on what industry your in.

trade associations, universities, free portals, vortals, directories, that are specific to an area will give out links if they deem your site very useful, maybe its because the webmaster does not understand linking strategies, or that their site is a deemed hub, by directories / search engines, that linking to you is not going to harm them, articles in news based sites is a good example.

other means are a little more dubious as in a thousand page website, with hundreds of incoming links to that base url, and the only link to your links page is from the base url, hence the rest of the links off the base is redistributed trhough the site, back to the base.

their are many ways, but relevant freebies is by far the best.