BeeDeeDubbleU - 1:12 pm on Jan 27, 2007 (gmt 0)

Privacy policies are not only for sites which collect personally identifying information. I think they are a good idea for any site.

Yes of course they are but as Steveb says they are hardly a quality indicator. While we are on the subject, I agree with some of your assertions but IMHO some of the others are not really quality related. I suppose it depends on whether you mean signals of crap to the casual visitor or to another designer doing an analysis of the site.

Reciprocal link request pages.

Why is this a problem? Many quality sites offer this and done properly it is not a problem.

Outdated copyright date or last modified date visible on the pages.

This could be a minor oversight. It is quite common and it would not necessarily indicate to me that the site is of poor quality.

Massive numbers of incoming links from link farms.

How would a site visitor recognise this?

No / very few outbound links. No / very few inbound links.

Related to quality? Not in my view.

All inbound links are to homepage only.

Why is this a problem?