Common Sense And Backlinks

First I'm not a link expert, but I do consider myself a pretty logical guy, so lately I've been thinking about links. Here's what I'm thinking through, and would love some other people to chime in.

First: I'm not questioning if any of these methods do or do not work, I'm simply thinking through why they would or would not.

In full disclosure I either currently or have in the past used most of these methods with varying degrees of success. Anyway...

Profile Links: Why in the world would Google give any kind of weight to a link in someone's profile? Even if it's legit it's simply self promotion, no one is going to put their "favorite" site in their forum profile. If I was Google I wouldn't consider these for anything.

Blog Comments: The link you get from entering your website on the comment field is another link I think should be useless. Again, nothing more than self promotion. If a real person is commenting on a blog and they want to share a site, they're going to paste a link in their comment. And chances are it's not going to use anchor text. If I was google I would give more weight to these types of blog comment links.

Article Directory Links: Same story. Nothing but self promotion. If I was Google I wouldn't count these for anything.

Blogroll Links/home page links: While these are easy to buy, I think if their natural they do show that a webmaster thinks another site is worth seeing. I can see how these have some value.

In Context Links: Obviously this is where the magic happens. I'm pretty sure I'm going to focus almost all of my linking efforts here and a couple other places. Things like guest blogging are great for this, but even better if you can get some link bait out there.

Social Bookmarks: If you can figure out what's spam and what's legit, these should factor heavily into a site's "ranking". Trouble is there's a lot of spam. I'm sure the smart people at Google can figure this out somehow. But if we take these for face value by definition they're a vote for a site.

Facebook/Twitter: Similar to social bookmarks. I think retweeted links should carry more weight, but again this is how popular sites are shared. Going forward surely this gets more important.

I'm sure I left out a bunch of stuff. Just my thoughts on links in general.