fantomNews™ — the ultimate know

Wiep Knol has released the results of his survey on link value factors as seen by a slew of well known professional SEOs such as Eric Ward, Aaron Wall, Jim Boykin, Barry Schwartz, Peter da Vanzo and Joost de Valk,  not to forget the ever helpful Michael Martinez as well as relatively new but highly competent and well-regarded names such as Hamlet Batista and lots of others including Wiep himself.  (And yes, yours truly actually participated as well.)

What’s interesting about the results isn’t merely the overall metrics – it’s the individual comments on various questions such as the perceived linkjuice power of .edu and .gov domains, the value of anchor texts, linking sites’ topicality, authority status, and more.

While it may not hold water as being sufficiently representative of the SEO industry’s general perception from a formal academic statistics point of view, seen from a pragmatic angle it is arguably the most systematic and comprehensive detailed overview available to date.

And let’s not forget that it merely reflects opinions and outsiders’ assessments, informed as they may be by tons of practical research and a total of several decades’ worth of combined experience. So: Be aware that this isn’t the search engines speaking openly to us (as if they ever did…), it’s those practitioners who have worked (and, yes: gamed) them for longer than most of them will probably care to remember.

In short: This is the grunts in the trenches sharing their knowledge, the guys and gals who have to deal with search engine rankings on a daily basis.

Nor does this observation devalue the results in any way, on the contrary: It merely puts the survey in its proper perspective, and as such it’s as close to to a viable check list and actionable strategy based on real world expertise as you’re ever going to get: cutting through all the misleading fluff constituting the search engines’ webmaster guidelines and their spinmeisters’ obnoxious FUD-cum-Kool-Aid statements.

Thanks, Wiep, for undertaking this effort – and thanks to all our colleagues who participated!

You can read the entire post here:

Link Value Factors

There’s also both a color and a printer friendly PDF version available for download on site.

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