What makes a link valuable?

March 15, 2005 | Posted by Sapphire

There’s an interesting thread at SEW about What is the Value in Links – OLD vs. NEW. The search engines don’t count every inbound link to your site as having equal value, because they don’t. Obviously a link you can generate yourself for free does not indicate site quality from a searcher’s perspective.

But other examples are less black and white. Does an old link on an old domain mean someone’s had consistent faith in your site for a while? Or does it mean they aren’t updating their content? Even if they’re updating content, that doesn’t mean they’ve been to your site in months.

It’s an ongoing challenge for SE’s to figure out how to determine site quality through purely mathematical means. And that’s not even considering the problem of subjectivity.

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