As there are so many factors coming into play.

Instead to provide a test that would determine the effectiveness of such links on a scale of result in comparison to the humble link.

In this case I believe it achieved its point.

Perhaps URL references could be part of their trending algorithm also, you would think it would have some effect.  Though the point being, I’ve seen many people also state or claim that google are smarter than they are with regards to un-linked url’s.

“Signals of all types can have a greater impact for well-established websites”

This is very generalistic in nature and unfortunately does not justify questioning the validity of effect on THIS particular signal.

It was not about questioning if signals have an effect, or some effect at all on aged sites when combined with multiple other signals.  Rather I personally read it as a view into how much effect in comparison to what we know Google is very largely driven on.

So….. if your told it doesnt matter if you get that link for doing great high quality content on well respected sites, because google knows you did the content just because your URL is there…..

Well I think we can safely say, you’d be better off just getting a good old fashion url link back.

It’s almost completely mathematically impossible to reverse-engineer any specific Google ranking signal anyway.  The algorithm doesn’t allow you to isolate any specific factors so how can you identify them?  The best you can do is to look at a NATURAL search result (an existing, real query that is already fully populated by natural, unoptimized content) and then “shake up the mix” with a simple change to see what happens.  But even behind a natural query there are algorithmic factors that may prevent a lot of your tests from having any impact, even though they might have an impact in highly competitive queries.As for reporting, you don’t provide any detail about the age or quality of the Websites where you placed the articles, nor about when the articles were cached in Google, nor whether the articles were passing control anchor text through normal links to other destinations, etc.  Hence, it is impossible for anyone to replicate your experiment and compare their results to your reported results.  At best you have provided one more anecdote for people to think about but your experiment is not very useful beyond stimulating thought and conversation.Hypothetically Google could be following these URL references only for “discovery”, meaning they just want to include the destinations in the index.  Of course, Google often indexes new domains without any links or references to them at all.