Pushed to the second search result

My clifinar blog lost its position to a hub page. I still didn't give up and making some efforts to return to my favorite spot.
After talking to another competitor I started to understand that this competition is not pure seo. It invloves things that are related to personal connections with website owners in order to get valuable links. I am playing this game in exactly the same way, but this leaves no space to other clifinar players who have lots of motivation, but no friends with websites owners who can link to their site. At this stage it seems that other web marketing actions have less power than links. You can see that the first two results in this game have many sites pointing to them.
In a real seo case, this would not be the case. Getting important links to your site usually don't have much with personal connection. Link exchange programs work on different rules, and also quality content is much more significant.
As I alreasy wrote, I play the game exactly like others do, but I am not sure this is the way seo in a real competitive environment work.