Well in my post, I never advocated using anything other than your actual name, site, etc. In the comments, I explicitly recommend creating real profiles and using your real name. So I agree with you there.
First, those numbers and guidelines are entirely anecdotal. Yes, there is a "honeymoon" phase with new domains, but that's entirely unpredictable and there's no hard limit of links before you're in the clear (or in the danger zone for that matter).
Second, if a comment is put into moderation, and then must be approved by the blog owner, how is that anything but authentically earned? The blogger can approve or disprove your comment at her discretion, you're not exploiting any systems or anything.
I simply can't ever agree with someone who says that leaving a blog comment with your url in the website field makes you a Gray Hat SEO. If that were the case, there would be tens of thousands of mommy bloggers yelling at Google for banning their sites.
It's natural engagement with the community, with backlinks as a nice little perk.
I didn't get that from Rand's blog although I have read it. I got my figures through testing with some junk domains (I experimented with around 25 domains - .net, .com and .infos) to see of they get sandboxed when pushing X amount of links to it or by doing certain things and those were the results which I found albeit it's a small sample size.
Regarding the second part, it's very easy to beat the approval system on many blogging softwares - Wordpress for instance is extremely easy to do.
And regardless if you agree with me or not, blog commenting is a Grey Hat SEO technique. I also said that the effects for doing a few links is minimal in terms of negatively affecting a sites SEO rankings which I agree with you on, I am just disagreeing with you over the fact that this should be a startup's SEO strategy
As for the 500-1000 links thing, I assume you got that number from one of Rand's posts (http://moz.com/rand/the-first-500-links/).
First, those numbers and guidelines are entirely anecdotal. Yes, there is a "honeymoon" phase with new domains, but that's entirely unpredictable and there's no hard limit of links before you're in the clear (or in the danger zone for that matter).
Second, if a comment is put into moderation, and then must be approved by the blog owner, how is that anything but authentically earned? The blogger can approve or disprove your comment at her discretion, you're not exploiting any systems or anything.
I simply can't ever agree with someone who says that leaving a blog comment with your url in the website field makes you a Gray Hat SEO. If that were the case, there would be tens of thousands of mommy bloggers yelling at Google for banning their sites.
It's natural engagement with the community, with backlinks as a nice little perk.