Text vs Button
 

I have been doing some research for a little while and I know that by targeting simple keywords with text link recips you can get good ranking and traffic from that keyword that you targeted.

What I want to know is what if the link back wasn't a targeted keyword text and it was just a button link back with an Alt tag on it. Would it be worth anything?

Example: Say I have 100 targeted keyword text recips and I have 400 button link backs with just Alt tags. Which would be worth more the text links or the button links as far as getting traffic from any keyword?

With the numbers you gave, I think the 400 links back with a button would be better than 100 text. But, with all things equal, 100 targetted text links are better than 100 button links.

Just my 2 cents

Yes with the numbers I have given I agree, but what I am wondering is for the button what would it be targeting. What type of traffic would you get from it if there is no keyword text with it.

I think if you're asking for a button link back you should also povide the code incl. width/height and your desired alt text, and insist that people are using it! Otherwise they're too slack and don't bother about a decent alt - which actually helps a lot as far as I can judge from my TGPs...

If I understand you correctly, you are asking what kind of click-thru you would get with a button? I guess that would depend on what the button looked like, where it was placed on a page, and how relevant the page was to the content of your button.

What I am asking is what type of traffic would I get if I had 400 ibls with no text links all.

How would the SE determine what type of traffic to send to me or would it not send any traffic at all.

I think that the best way to think about this is to look at the linklists that have been around for a long time - we always used button recips up until recently - when the "new wave" was to do the cat recips and text recips - and in all of those years, the same linklists placed the same for their major keywords and categories - some better than others, but I think the recip is more judged by the surrounding content and the text on the page of the sending and recieving ends

Very good point Linkster. So as long as the pages are rich in content I should be fine if I just use a general button link back.