I just ran a test of combining the two tutorials together and they worked on my computer, I did not run into a problem.
The only thing I can see that may cause an issue, is the Centering links tutorial has you add this code after line 17:
map.setCenter(point, 13);
the second argument in the setCenter function is the zoom level, change 13 to the zoom level you are trying to use.
If you still have problems, can you post a link to your page so I can examine the code.