Miamacs - 11:00 am on Apr 2, 2007 (gmt 0)

INBOUND LINKS CAN'T HURT YOU!

Their origin sure doesn't seem to matter as in it will not raise penalties.

But outsourcing link development, by these guidelines, to people who don't know about an industry, do not care about instructions and effectively don't know the region and the targeted audience...

Repetitive, overused anchor text is a given.
And a penalty for it.

So inbound links can hurt you. Hit the threshold for spam and suddenly you're pass the top and are going downhill.

Besides, it was interesting to see these guidelines you thought up. You've mentioned you wanted this campaign to have an impact on SEO, yet all your instructions were more or less focusing on user-related parameters.

Quality link in SEO is:

Relevancy + Trust

Relevancy as in the source, the link and the target being relevant at least in a broad manner. Pagerank, number of links, color of the background, name of the webmaster, age of the author doesn't really matter as long as the pages come up in the top 1000 in Google for a related one or two word phrase. At least when you're talking pure, dry SEO. ( Which is what you aimed for, isn't it? )

If you're worried that it's only trust that keeps them from being washed away by the filters, or that no one would believe that it's a natural link, you can have a preliminary evaluation and drop some of them from your list.

The end.

... of the story about the quality factor. But there are many others to consider. ( PageRank gives the WEIGHT to the links, thus is important as a multiplier. And there's also the factor of how much traffic the link brings, which sometimes has nothing to do with either of the above, think popular forums with no cache, famous, legit blogs using nofollow etc... )

[edited by: Miamacs at 11:16 am (utc) on April 2, 2007]