Ever wonder how much a text link is really worth based on the sole factor of the link popularity component in search rankings? Most SEOs have thought about this more then once. Web ads are sold in large number of ways; CPM, monthly, CPC, CPA and so on. To sell an ad, text link ad, based on an objective characteristic of factors would be nice, to say the least. randfish, who has built several useful SEO Tools and already is in the process of building a new tool to calculate the fair price of a text link advertisement. The current criteria randfish came up with, which he listed at a Cre8asite thread named Factors Affecting Link Pricing, includes:

1. PageRank of Site (poor measurement, but probably still worthwhile)
2. PageRank of Page
3. Site Position in Top 50 Results for Primary Term (TLD)
4. Page Position in Top 50 Results for Primary Term (Page specific)
5. Number of External Links on Page
6. Site Flavor from Google (shows theme)
7. Date of Cached Snapshot of Page (shows spidering frequency)
8. Primary Topic of Page Extracted via Yahoo! API (Then conduct C-Index with target term)
9. Alexa Rank (again, poor measurement, but probably worthwhile)
10. External Links to Site (Using Yahoo! LinkDomain Search)
11. External Links to Page (Using Yahoo! Link Search)
12. Internal Links to Page vs. # of Internal Pages
13. Type of Link (customizable text, directory listing, banner/image, etc.)
14. Location of Link (content section, advertising section, navigation area, footer, etc.)

Bill Slawski and other members add their thoughts to the tool. Bill said he would like to see a weight factor added in for links from sites at the .gov or .edu domain extension. In addition, in anticipation of future search ranking factors, Bill recommends incorporating link location and age of site being linked from. Sanity also added a note about "trustworthyness" and including that into the equation. How can that be done? I know DigitalPoint's co-op network runs off of PageRank being one of the indicators of the site being trustworthily to be in the network. Interesting concept, but hard to actually quantify.

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