Linkbuilding article in the weekly newsletter

Hey everyone,

sorry to bring this topic up again, but the current weekly newsletter from Developer Shed confused me here: In the article about what to avoid when building links, the authors list several good points, but some points conflict with what we discussed last week about links hurting your rankings or not.

Staying away from link farms and not looking for links from unrelated sites is good advice and can be interpreted along the line of 'It won't help you enough, so don't waste your time on it'.

But the authors say other things that seem to conflict with the strong statement 'Backlinks can never hurt you!!!' which I was told last week:

"You don’t really want to be part of a directory whose only criteria for admitting you is having a live link."
"If one approaches you and asks to link to you, just say no."
"If you own an ordinary e-commerce site, you really don’t want to have a link on a site that is oriented to sex or gambling."

So, are the authors of the Developer Shed newsletter giving out false advice? What they say here sounds to me like: "You don't want those links!" instead of "Don't invest time into getting those links".

well because you need to link only to a related sites and not to sites that has nothing to do with yours, this can only harm your site and might get banned on google.