Forum Moderators: open
You will find a staggering amount of information in this forum that might be of use to you for your thesis. Try reading through the forums or using the search feature find information on specific topics.
As to off the page criteria, the two main factors are Popularity and Themes.
Popularity can be broken down into Link Popularity and Clickthrough Popularity. Link popularity is determined by quantity and quality of ingoing and outgoing links and the relevancy of those links (determined by the text and by a sites theme). Clickthrough popularity (which isn't necessarily considered off the page criteria, but I believe it to be pertinent) is simply the amount of hits a site gets, how many pages are viewed, and how long the visitor remains at the site or page.
For more information on themes, check Brett's article at Searchengineworld:
[searchengineworld.com...]
This is just a brief summary...you can find more information (and probably more accurate) by reading around this forum and www.searchengineworld.com
