That is, I am afraid, as “authoritative” as my examples can get. And, of course, as people watch those SERPs and see value in them, the SERPs will change due to other people’s optimization.

This blog IS an SEO experiment (many of them, actually).

1) Linking strategy depends solely on your business business model and its goals. Do you want your website to stand long and true, or do you want to take the money and run (a few times a year).

2) Obtaining a relevant link, as opposed to just any old link, gives you the best shot at converting a visitor into a buyer/subscriber (qualified traffic).

3) A #1 Rank is worthless if it’s not going to mean new customers/subscribers.

4) A well-respected, long-standing brand has to be very careful of where it proactively acquires links and traffic from.

The relevant link babble is a valid advice to companies who have a brand to protect and a public image to look out for. Linking to a competitor is of course nonsense. There are plenty of other relevant pages out there that do not belong to a competitor.

As Tetsuto pointed already out, links on relevant site make it hard to impossible for Google to suspect fishy business and an attempt to game the system. Google has no real grounds to penalize anybody for placing a link to a page that is relevant to the subject of the page the link resides on and benefits the user who visits the page. Even if the link is paid for (in one form or another).

You are right that it does not matter TODAY if the page that links to you is relevant to your site or not, as long as the anchor text is relevant and the site that links to you is still able to pass on link juice. This is very likely to change in the future and make people regret some of the links they have out there, which were not detected by Google before that. They will come back to bite you and the whining will be great.

If you are not in it for the long run and want to make a quick buck here and now and are willing to gamble and take some risks to get stopped right in the tracks before you are able to cash in, by my guest and get links from any sucker out there who is willing to link to any site regardless of content as long as the money is right. Make as much money as quickly as you can and when detected (manually or algorithmically) run and start from scratch again.

But you know that already. You got some links out of it (relevant links btw.), which was the whole idea of the exercise. Good Job!

Its probably true that some adult webmasters will not trade links for the reason you state, but I think that is a case of too much undisciplined acquisition of inaccurate information. Those webmasters would be conflating Google myth with their industry’s best practices, which is pretty common in non-adult SEO as well.

Adult webmasters do have a very good reason not to trade links with sites outside their niche–conversion. Bandwidth is still an issue and your granny lovers arent going to be too interested in your cheerleader offerings (and if you have granny cheerleaders, well you have a new niche…)

Mr Martinez – Finally! It’s high time you stopped wandering hither and fro agitating the forum owners of the SEO world…

I agree, that “relevance” of the link is not only based on “relevance” of page with the link. The factor of “relevant links from relevant pages” is not fundamental. For example, a link from Washington Post is much better that “featured” link to your site from niche site with duplicate content.
But I think, that gaining of “relevant links from relevant pages” is looks like nature of linkbait, so it’s stays on. It’s not a myth.
Search engines bots are stupid, and they can’t to measure exactly the relevance of page without analysing of paths to it.

Just my 2 cents.