CainIV - 6:06 am on Jul 27, 2011 (gmt 0)

CainIV, Could you elaborate, please?

-Age of site
-Age of page on the website
-Number of relevant inbound links to that page and quality assessment of those links
-Location of potential link on the page
-Number of outbound links on that page
-Relevancy of outbound links on that page
-Page rank of page
-Cache date of page
-Internal link structure to page
Type of link on page (Listing, contextual link, advertising placement, resource list, comment, sponsorship, etc.
-Title and H1 tag of that page
-Relevance of page keywords to core keyword query
-Length of time link could be negotiated for

Hope this helps

I am sure there are exceptions, but in my brief tour around the SERPs, they all had backlink profiles that put their competitors to shame.

Definitely a good observation. Google is now able to use a much wider range and rich set of signals to determine relevance of a given page, and of brand.

In my estimation, diversity wins currently - a wide mix of a range of different types of citations that all support the notion of your brand.

Always think from where your brand would be 'expected' to have links at.

T