decaff - 10:38 pm on Jun 28, 2005 (gmt 0)

no mud intended..

It is inevitable that when links are discussed (inbound/outbound/relevant/on-topic/off-topic/authorative/organically acquired/purchased...etc) .. that the discussion tends to degrade because everyone has different experiences with how Google calculates all of this and how these caclulations ultimately affect one's site or sites..at any given time in the SERPs cycles..

So planning a link campaign at any level really has to originate from these simple points:
--> Google is a a link based search engine content aggregator
--> Google will find pages via established (aged) and newly acquired (fresh) link relationships...
--> Google will see all the link relationships (that aren't intentially hidden or buried for whatever reason)
--> Google will then calculate, in the background, per each page crawled, the value of each link based on it's rating systems (authorative vs. relevant vs. on-topic vs. off-topic...etc..etc..) and then these calculations eventually find their respective place in the value of a page and it will find its place in the SERPs
--> The value of the link relationship itself should be the first consideration before the site owner starts to think about ranking and PR...