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I thought that the important factor in the value of a link was how many outing links a page has total.  Some tools seems to tell me that the important data point is how many EXTERNAL links a page has.   Which number should I be paying attention to when looking at pages I want to get linked from?

(Yes, I know there are many other factors that are important)

Just some more info:

we used "opencube" to make our menus.   Fantastic software.

Just adding a few things to this posters questions.

I was always told that Java drop down menus were bad.  I made sure my menus were html that could be seen in the code.   I read recently that Google is getting better at reading java menus.  I am not sure I believe this.

I have menus that open up into a tree structure; refining the search as you go.  I find this to be good for the user experience as fewer clicks are required to get where you want to go.  I am unsure of the seo downside to my menu structure as it means each of my pages have 170 links.

I figure they can find related sites in several ways.  How can you tell if they have made this determination?

Thanks, This helps a lot.   We are setting up linking so that we have no reciprocal links exist. (in fact we use something more like a>b>c>d>a). As I inspected domains, to my surprise, non are on the same C-Bock.   We are removing errant links and checking duplicate content.   Much of our content on the product item level is duplicate.  In the past, we simply published product text to the most relevant website a week before it hit the other sites.  Linking has been pretty organic, so link profiles are fine.  Some of the sites have results that show up close to each other in google SERP's now.

I have a handful of e-commerce websites that overlap each other some in the same niche.   I have already heard that it would have been best to make just one website, but this is not practical for me.  Our business model goes back to a time before the internet.  We have relationships with manufacturers where they refer business to us because we brand web sites which will not switch customers to competing brands.  Our agreements make it ok to link to other websites so long as we have branded websites that focus on the specific manufacturers.

For SEO, what is the best way to link these sites?

Site wide links in footers.?

Single links at on homepages?

One way links from the most powerful site?

Some other method?

We have been wrestling with this question for some time.