Do-Follow Forum Posting

Wrong... Forum posting is quite affective if the forum... and even better - the thread... is relevant to your URL. The problem with forum posting (like every other unnatural link building technique where you are planting links on other sites - blog commenting, article submission, directory submission, etc.) is that those links loose their effectiveness over time as they fall deeper and deeper into the archives.

And Google does not only read the first text link on a page to a domain. This is total non-sense. If you could only link to a domain once from a page, it would be pretty hard (ummm... impossible) to build an information architecture for a site. Wow... home page can only link to one other page on its site... that page could only link to one other page... etc. Same applies when linking to domains other than your own.

They may discount site-wide links slightly... especially those at the bottom of the page... like footer links or blogroll links... but that has nothing to do with multiple links to the same domain from the same page.

If you are going to link to an external domain multiple times from the same page, it would be optimal to 1) link to different URLs on that target domain or 2) if you link to the same URL on the target domain then link to it with varying link text. But there is no proof that a target URL does not get credit for both inbound links when two links to that same URL come from the same page on your site.