martinibuster - 10:11 pm on Apr 12, 2011 (gmt 0)

It's fun to disagree in a civil manner. It's good to work these things out. :)

Let's have a look at your first example, HBSC.ORG:

a ) hbscDOTorg/contactlinks.html ( Health Behaviour in School-aged Children Org ) Compete traffic uniques ZERO! , TBPR 6, MT 5.73, DMT 5.78, MR 4.49, PA 34

HBSC.ORG
Quantcast traffic report shows zero traffic. Let's hear how the Quantcast crap-o-meter stacks up against the other stats. ;)

Yahoo site explorer shows me 665 backlinks and Google reports 154. However I think that data is not correct so it's difficult to comment on whether that data undermines what's showing in the toolbar.

In terms of quality, the backlinks are coming from a wide variety of CCTLDs and from many languages. Hmmm... Subtract the non-English links and the number of relevant backlinks goes down even more.

The backlinks are all on topic, but it's not much of a topic, children's mental health. So it's to be expected that the traffic levels are going to be low. It's not really a useful link in terms of affiliate or AdSense earnings. Is traffic an indicator of that? Ok, hard to say definitively.

ibfan.org
The Quantcast crap-o-meter [quantcast.com] shows zero traffic. Let's see what the rest of the stats show.

Google reports 201 backlinks. Yahoo reports 28 inbound links. Again, I don't have confidence in those stats. I don't know how far off they are, but right now both Google and Yahoo are showing significantly less backlinks than I suspect these sites have. So I'm not sure if those stats undermines the PageRank 5 of that site.

It is clear that getting a link from this domain is useful. Every link is useful. But if a link buyer is going to put a price on this link based on Mozrank or PageRank then I believe they are going to be overpaying and would be better off bribing several dozen blogspot bloggers. I would go with the Quantcast stat.

On the other hand of spectrum, we have lot of sites run by the list building , direct marketing guys syndicate who have long page sales letter type 1 page sites attracting 40-50K traffic

You should run some of those URLs in the Quantcast traffic meter. You'll be surprised at how low the traffic is on some of those networks, despite how much traffic they get, how many appearances the blogger has made on their local morning show and how many journalism and marketing degrees the publishers might have. If they're blocking Quantcast then run. They're hiding the obvious, that their comment spamming and reciprocal link networks aren't working.