As I was checking the links that have been popping up to SEOmoz, I noted that many come from international SEO communities, forums & blogs. I'm flattered and certainly quite pleased, but it also got me thinking about the value of international links in the eyes of the search engines.

Following this out to its logical conclusion, I surmise that international links could actually lend weight and legitimacy to a site in the eyes of the search engines. If I were an IR engineer, one of the things that could point me to quality sites would be their referencing across geographic and national boundaries. After all, it is much more difficult to build a link manually or purchase a link from a country not your own, especially so on a website who's language is not your own.

Certainly, blog spam & other types of malicious link building need to be ruled out in order for this usage to be effective, but I think there could be great value to measuring the geographic locations of links to help lend or pull legitimacy from a website. After all, if 500 hundred english language sites all link to you, but your compeititor has links from 10 or 12 different countries or languages, clearly your site is not as "internationally" or "universally" encompassing as your competitiors.

This is definitely something to think about for the future. There's even a thread on the subject at Cre8asite.