say you create a German website on a certain topic. The main website is in German. However you translate it or at least the most important parts of it into English so the whole world can see the most important parts...and because it might be easier to get English language links than German language links as the English language web is simply a bit bigger.

So basically what Im wondering is this: obviously you wont get keyword in the anchor text, but does a link from a foreign language website in a foreign language to a foreign language part of your website help you the same way a link in your own language helps?

Umm..I think I just realized the problem: the language thing might not make links be less valuable, but the fact that those links will come from websites that are not hosted in your country/dont have the cctld of your country/... might make them less effective, right?

You should consider link authority, and even that is probably dead in the near future. The thing is, links are not that important in the near-to-long future because Google will eventually look at other stats to rate the relavance of websites.

For now, links are still important and you should look first if the sites that are linking to you are sites with good rankings for important keywords. That's the main thing. As for language specific sites, I think the same applies. You should look for sites that rate well in language specific search engines.

I think, too that there's a good chance that Google will collect enough data to improve their algorithm's beyond link authority.

Actually, Ive thought about this quite a lot..for example if I had some great link bait tool or something like that which I could give away to other sites including a link to my site..I would think twice about it and wonder whether the benefit of the additional links that might give me, would really outweigh the future benefit I could get from people actually staying on my site to use the tool.

But dead in the near future? I think that is a pretty bold statement :-).

I think it's going to be a slow/gradual process that will take quite some time. However I think usage data is prone to being spammed, too and that they might be looking rather to use usage data to improve their algorithm by having a strong second ranking factor.

Maybe it will eventually be more important than linkage data, we'll see - maybe once I get out of college people will ask on SEO forums: how can I get my users to stay on my site??? How can I make them come back??? instead of "How can I get links?" "I need link bait!!!" :-)