Robert_Charlton - 8:24 pm on Jun 22, 2009 (gmt 0)

I've always sought links that would put me in good company, and I've assumed (and observed) that links from stingy linkers help.

That said, "stingy linking" doesn't automatically suggest discriminate or peceptive linking. It might simply be lazy or conservative linking limited to the usual suspects in a niche.

Whether the engines can distinguish between various kinds of stinginess may in fact not matter, but if you're building up a high quality site, it may be easier to get links from perceptive linkers than to get links from the lazy or conservative linkers.

Also... I think that, for Google, it helps to be a perceptive linker as well.