What's a really good example of a linkbait-y Category / Subcategory hierarchy?

[sweetfancymoses]

Rand makes a really great point in this 2009 post about the shape of crawl paths:

"#4. Craft navigation / category pages that are worthy of links.  If you can make these pages worthy of links and attention, you drive PageRank and crawl priority further down your site's architecture into the content (and signal the engine that ALL your pages are important."

Which makes sense, intuitively, because you'd like link juice to flow directly and undiluted to your money pages.  "Here's all my Green Widgets, Roger: they're all right here. While you're at it, here's a related blog post—'5 Ridiculously Awesome Things Every Green Widget Buyer Should Know'—and, oh look!  Would you like to see my Blue Widgets as well?"

In practice, though, the Home » Widgets » Green Widgets doesn't sound all that alluring.  Useful, absolutely, for UX, but not for getting links.  Anyone have some favorite examples of Category / Subcategory hierarchies that do well as link-bait?

Client is a marketing agency dealing in the technical arcana of databases and ad serving, so their money pages won't be as specific as a Green Widget or a Miami Hotel.  Their site isn't huge, and the pages will be extensively interlinked, so the emphasis has more to do with link juice / page authority than indexation.  But I'm wondering if it could it be smart to replace a generic "Services" category with a KW-rich drop-down menu of "Marketing Solutions"  (i.e. 'Increase Customer Retention') and link each landing page to a relevant charcuterie of services, white papers, webinars, case studies, etc., rather than keeping these pages in their respective silos—even as they link horizontally to related services?

[KaneJamison]

Link Building-Focused Examples:

Stephanie Chang has a good SEOMoz article on Creative link building for ecommerce sites that discusses good pages.

Design Examples:

Another article on Smashing Magazine details some beautiful/creative ecommerce designs. While the post is slightly more focused on the design, there are some good examples on there of unique content, too. Both are important in earning links on otherwise boring pages, and will greatly increase user trust and conversions if done well. Here are some other similar articles from Smashing Magazine: Design Showcase Of Creative Online-Shops, 35 Beautiful E-Commerce Websites.

**Seat Geek: **

This is an OK example that comes to mind of content - but they could do better. If you look at a page like http://seatgeek.com/paul-mccartney-tickets/#about, you'll see on the left sidebar that there are tabs for "About Paul McCartney Tickets" which contains some statistics about concert ticket prices, among other things. They could do a better job by improving the design of the page and making it more visually appealing, and by featuring this content above the tickets themselves, rather than hiding it on the about tab like they're currently doing.

Service Sites:

For a Service site... nothing changes. Instead of assisting a user in the decision process between products, you're doing it for services. Make the design look sharp, keep all of those pages 1 click from the homepage unless there's tons of them, and make the pages useful to the user.

Regarding the "Marketing Solutions" concept, I'd say give users two options: browse by service itself, or browse by solution. This satisfies them whether they know what they're looking for or not, and it adds context to the existing service pages.