What do the "best" backlink profiles look like, in terms of percentages from quality content, bookmarks, social media, directories, etc?

[withoutthestress]

I recognize that there is no such thing as one ideal link profile, per se, but I am curious, if you sampled 100 high authority sites, what would their inbound links look like on average, broken out by source type?

Some sites would have a ton of social sharing due to their funny pop-cultural content, while others might be quoted and linked in context for their brilliant insights. A very technical resource might gain a lot of links from forum discussions.

If I can complete this exercise on my own, I welcome your advice on how to do that with OSE or the like.

[withoutthestress]

Thanks, Russ. Fantastic insight in the article. Really helps me to think about the whole thing more clearly.

[HiveDigitalInc]

So, I would recommend you take a look at a piece i wrote called "The Wikipedia Model" http://www.seomoz.org/blog/the-wikipedia-model a little while back. It doesn't look at the type of sites, but it does look at lots of link characteristics.

As for grouping sites by type, this is a little harder. We have done this before, but basically you will need to harvest the links to the sampled high authority sites, spider them, and use footprint detection to determine whether they tend to be certain types of sites. Not terribly difficult to do, but  will be a lot of data.