pageoneresults - 5:30 pm on May 19, 2006 (gmt 0)

What determines Link Quality?

That is the question you need to ask yourself when linking to other sites.

Personally, I've never really participated in any link exchanges. When building sites, we always have a resources section and those resources are chosen based on the clients industry and the value to the visitors, period! There is no exchange going on unless of course the webmaster of the destination site has seen our referrals and decided to link to us from somewhere on their site. That's what I call a natural link exchange.

1 - Should I be dropping these "less than valuable" links?

If you feel they are "less than valuable", then yes, you should be reviewing and purging those where necessary.

2 - Should I selectively add <rel="nofollow">?

Red flag. I wouldn't touch that attribute with a 10 foot pole unless of course I had a blog or similar outlet. The whole purpose of that attribute was to curtail blog spamming.

3 - Should I delete all my links pages?

Yup! Based on that sentence and the words "links pages", I'd say you may need to rethink those pages.

So, back to what determines the quality of a link. Not only do you need to look at the quality of those resources you link to, you also need to look at the quality of your outbound link. If it's sitting on a links page in your standard format, it may not have as much value. If it were a link that was naturally placed within related content, that link may have a bit more value. It's all relative.