What you should be looking for when you accept a link?

I've already mentioned that there's a grey area about accepting / rejecting links because the offered links are on pages that aren't cached. The page might be cached because of bad practises, or because it is simply too new.

But what else should you be looking for?

Well, if the page is cached or has a page rank (even 0), then that's a good start. It means Google has found it and has access to it.

What it it's not cached / page ranked? Go to the site's home page and look for their resources / links page link. Click it and then probably you will find yourself on the link's directory home page with a list of categories. From here try to click through to the page your link is on.

If you can't find the links page by click from the home page (sometimes you need to go via the sitemap) then search engines aren't going to find it either. And that's why it's not cached. If you can't navigate from home page to links page then I would alsways say no.

As you click through the pages watch the page rank. If suddenly it disappears then go back to the previous page (with page rank) and look at the link. Has it been hidden in any way, e.g. through rel=nofollow in the link.

Also take a look at the site's robots.txt file and make sure that's not blocking the links directory. There are many different tricks here. Basically, have a quick look and if there is any blocking then reject it. Otherwise, give the site the benefit of the doubt and check again in a few weeks, or after the next page rank update.

Other things to look for include rel=nofollow on your link. With a clever bit of coding, actually not that difficult, a person will see an OK link whereas a search engine will see a link blocked by te rel=nofollow, or hidden totally.

How do you detect this? Quite simply, look at the cached version of the page and then view the code. If there is javascript hiding or altering the link or it is any way blocked then you will see it in the code. And if the site is presenting a different version of the page to search engines, now you will spot it.