[jcorkern]

There are over 100 factors that are used to assign value to links and a few of them are: link anchor, position of link on page, keywords in title of page, ikeywords in content of page, PR of page and on and on, but the ones i have listed above account for about 90 % of link value.

Here are some of the reasons. A link in the top left of a page will carry more than a bottom left position and this is because of human eye patterns reading english. The english reader scans a page from top left in a reverse s pattern. So the engineers decided to value links according to this pattern as one factor.

Keywords in the title and content of the page shows relevence to your link and your site. Your title has fish and my title has fish, makes them relevent (related). Same in content. this gives more value to the link.

PR: how the site is doing PR wise and if it is an authority page (notice i said page?).

Each page is considered it's own entity with the search engines. If this were not true, every page of a site would have the same PR, but this is not the case. Each page is assigned a PR. Its own rating from Googe, yahoo ect...

So, your question was "Are you saying (all things being equal) that if I was promoting a tech site, that a link from hubpages would be just as good as a link from gizmodo?". This depends on the title, content, position of link and Pr of the page you are getting the link from.

You have to remember that a search engine is a program, it can not reason, it credits relevence by factors, not intelect.