In theory, there are something that we have to avoid regarding the backlinks: 1. Never add thousands of backlinks in a extremely short period of time. 2. Never use the same anchor text for all the backlinks. 3. Never have all backlinks from one ip. Otherwise the site may be penalized. In fact, there are also sayings that johnchow.com was once penalized by Google due to 1 and 2. But if it is the truth, and we do not think about anything related to ethics, we can just easily conquer our competitions by spamming their url. Or the above 3 rules do not really exist in Google???
Good advice... I would add a couple more tips to your list. 4. Avoid sitewide links. 5. Try to get links from sites that have relevant content to yours.
In fact, I think most webmasters will know all these tips. I am indeed thinking of the dark side.... Though I am not going to try that, it seems to me that we can spam our competitors' url and conquer them in Google....
You would be surprised at how many people don't know them. Personally though I would stay away from the "dark side".
I doubt that too many backlinks at one time will effect your SERPs, it is a theory... not a proven penalty. I can think of easily 100+ reasons why a site might get a large amount of backlinks in a short period, and none of them are cheating or manipulative.
Depends on what kind of backlinks in one time... Example directory submission... Since that directory approval takes many months to approve.. but if you build backlinks in SB, forums, this will lead to penalty because Google detect this instant build of links in one time....
Avoid backlinks? How can you rank without backlinks? A major part of indexing and ranking a site is the backlinks.