martinibuster - 12:14 am on Jun 30, 2011 (gmt 0)

Authority sites do not mean competitors necessarily. If you want to develop strong links...

There's a lot there that is subjective. What do you mean, when you say, Authority Site? What do you mean when you talk about a strong link?

I think the definition of authority site and a strong link tends to be fluid and not one we will all agree on. I also notice many people lie to themselves and use toolbar PR as a metric, even though they say they don't.

Authority
Authority as I think of it has to do with how well a site ranks for short phrases and how deep it ranks across thousands and thousands of related phrases. For me, the authority of a site is not something that can be passed through a link. So in terms of acquiring a link, the authority of a site is not that important to me, if authority is defined in terms of how well the site ranks.

Strong link
What makes a link strong? For me it's the absence of nonsense in their inbound links and the absence of same in their outbound links. There are other factors regarding the placement etc. that go into that to, that makes a link strong.

The above definitions of Authority and Strong Link do not mention PageRank. I will take a gray bar link or a white bar link over a PR 6 link from a site whose backlinks are associated with SEO forums, crap directories, is selling links, etc.