When exchanging links, what are the factors that help you to determine the value of a link? Off the top of my head, and not necessarily in order of importance: - clicks from home page - # of outbound links - total # of links - age of page - inbound external link count - page name (if it's links.* etc) - whether it's a directory page, content page, link partners page - keyword targetted link - placement prominence - site theme - site content quality - site traffic - page traffic - page PR - page indexed in Yahoo, Google, MSN, DMOZ - site indexed in Yahoo, Google, MSN, DMOZ What else?
As mentioned, look at the inbound links to the page where you're link will be placed. Check the inbound anchor text. If it's relevant to your link - I think it's a big plus. If the page has external inbound links, it's even better. If it's all internal links, it's not bad, but I prefer to have links on pages that have links from other sites. I consider leading and trailing text a bonus for any link. Instead of having a link followed by text, it's nice to get a link embedded within some text. I'll also take any emphasis placed on the anchor text - italicization, emboldening, etc..
I agree with all points on this thread adding that we need to also verify PR. Many think PR has no meaning, but I strongly suspect it does when dealing with incoming link value.
Not to mention that many sites that sell "advertising" space are faking their PR or have not that many good backlinks coming in other then a few high ones. Then when they loose those, they are worthless. Definately a good one to check out. I think you pretty much covered everything in the initial post when it comes to determing link partners. Oh yeah. Common Sense Brad
Also make sure the website is NOT using "nofollow" in all the links. Plus there is no robots.txt file to stop the crawlers to visit the page.
I don't know why page name (if it's links.* etc) would make any difference. For some reason, I believe one weird webmaster came up with the idea that pages named links.* are being devaluated. Why would they? I don't believe that Google would devaluate a website or page, just because of the name. A lot of webmasters changed the link page names into resources.*, is that the next page going to be devaluated? After that, we get partners.*, websites.*, etc. I don't believe it. But that's just my €0,02. Nice list though.
invisible text or links on the links page, or the link on the homepage to the links page is invisible.