You left out one important DON’T.

Don’t waste your time getting links from sites who do not use html text links to link back to you.

I did get a number of good quality links when I first started. Over the next 12 months nearly every one of them changed from a text link to a database lookup or javascript.
You guessed it, the sandbox effect was long and hard to live with.

99% of emailed requests I receive for links only offer back this useless type of link.

TIP
Never check your ‘link back’ from the url link they send in the email. Visit the home page and see if you can find the link. If you can’t find it, there is a good chance that the search engines will also give up and never index the page on which they have so ‘generously’ offered you a link. If the url they offer contains a ? then you know that search engines are unlikely to ever find the page to see your link.

By Anonymous - September 8, 2005

Nice comments above. Its interesting to note too that Microsoft’s Dev tools create massive websites with hundreds of data driven dynamic pages that have the ? in them.

So links from these pages where there is no sitemap in place is questionable particularly if there are more than 2 parameters after the ?

BigT
——————————–
http://www.yourownstores.com
http://www.1shoppingcart.com
http://www.celebvideos.biz

By KnowledgeableIdiot - December 28, 2005

Warren, definately a better article this time.

Look out for link offers from individuals who have used either robot.txt to NOT include the folder where the linking page is, or who have used a rel nofollow tag either in the link itself or as a directive at the top of the page.

All of the above will invalidate a perfectly good looking link.

——–
http://www.brighterwhites.com

By Anonymous - December 28, 2005