If you had 10 people building links for you in different countries (so you cannot read the sites they are getting links from), how would you measure their success over time?

Some factors I've considered:
- number of links
- number of new potential link partners found
- quality of linking pages (but how do you measure quality in an absolute way, at least for the purposes of measurement?)
- number of new potential link partners contacted
- keywords in links
- link placement on the page

I'm sure you'll all say 'measure quality', but I'm asking for a way to get some kind of relatively absolute sense of how these people are doing in comparison to each other. Of course I'm tracking rankings for all these places on their important keywords, but that's influenced by more than links and competitiveness of terms across markets varies, so that's not a very good measure of how the link builders are doing.

Any suggestions?

Kate

Very interesting point raised and you have a good list of items enumerated.

Links are not created of equal value, so the number of links could be a deceiving figure. It would be the same with potential number of partners found. Evaluating the quality of a link is subjective as well.. Many would refer to the incoming PageRank value attributed or passed on to your site but the case of rel=nofollow made it more complicated.

I would think of the most successful link campaigner as the one who built the most number of links that delivered most number of targeted traffic to your pages.

- Link age
- Link ranking for specific keyword
- Link PR
- Links BL pattern
...

You can use seomoz page strenght tool to check how much link is strong:
seomoz.org/tools/page-strength.php