How do you define high quality backlinks

[temi]

A user at another forum has just asked a very interesting question; how do you define what high quality backlinks are?
I offerred some explanations at the forum in question but I will like to hear how memebers of this forum will define high quality backlinks.

[JoyB]

I would like to know more about this as well.

[temi]

Perhaps the was to know about it is if we all add one or two qualities that can make a links "Good" and qualities that makes a link "Bad" lest start with the good:

1. Link placed on a page with few out going links
2. Link is themed (for example all the links on that page are related topics)
3. Link is not spammy

[Bagi Zoltán]

Measuring the value of a link is not easy, but there are some good solution like this online tool.

[temi]

I am sure tools are useful but I am more interested in what they use to determin the quality or value of a link. There is a tool for example that valued Temi’s Internet Blogs as being worth $6,000 (I will galdly sell the site for half that value
I will like you to inpute what you personally think make a link good or bad link

[Bagi Zoltán]

Ok, now I try to give a better response I think not the PR is not the first. That is also important but the good effect of the high PR links are indirectly improve the traffic by better rankings. So I think the value of a link can be measured through the magic word the generated traffic.

I believe that strong quality link comes from a site that ranks well within milions of results for keywords that I am optimising for. And that site looks like it offers a useful content. I do not care about PageRank, I do not care about the anchor text I only care if that page can be displayed on first or second page in SE for comepetive keywords. Something like my Australian web directory comes on the third page for keywords 'add url free'. Having a link on page like that is worth more than 100s backlinks from sites that are struggling to be ranked well for its own domain name.

[UK WW ex member]

Yes a lot of parameters google software considers that we all dont know all.

My idea is who votes you , how important he is for your industry etc

[OldWelshGuy]

Good chat.

To define good and bad, we must first decide what the outcome is that we wish to achieve. E.G. increased PR, qualified traffic, SEO benefits.

High PR.
This is the easy one, as the quality of the link can be directly valued by the PR value of the page divided by the volume of links (internal and external) on the page.

Qualified Traffic
It starts getting harder now, as how do you measure the traffic level of a website? Forums are fairly easy as you can see page views and posts, so that makes life easier. Webstats is another way, depends on what you are paying for the link though.

SEO Benefits.

This is where it REALLY starts getting complicated, as we have
1. Anchor text
2. Theme of site (including inbound link anchor text)
3. Location of link on page
4. Size of font
5. Ranking of anchor page for similar phrases as yours
6. Content on page
7. Content surrounding the link
And more besides that I won't go into.

Hopefully though this should stimulate debate