I was reading up on seo today (I do that every day) and read this in an article about types of links to avoid:

Blog Rolls

Blog rolls can be good for traffic and publicity, but they have limited SEO value. Most blog rolls appear in sidebars and on every page. Without knowing exactly how search engines count blog rolls, it is probably safe to consider these as one link per site. Chances are good that search engines count them, but greatly depreciate them.

Text Links

Avoid off-site text links outside of content, especially in sidebars and footers. Site wide text links are especially ominous. Imagine how having Colorado Fine Silverware link to your website from the footer of every page on numerous sites looks to search engines.

Legitimate text link ads do exist. Search engines try to ignore these, but probably have limited tolerance. Buy too many ads and it begins to look like rankings manipulation. If search engines identify your text link ads they will not help SEO, but buy too many and it could hurt.

Most adult webmasters are hesitant to put a link on their page anywhere but the footer. I think that in the long run, and possibly even it is already happening, having footer links on your site can get your site penalized. Having too many incoming links from other sites' footers can get you penalized. Same thing with side bar links and site wide links.

AKA you may want to consider the above also when looking at your back links.

I heard this story too (or read somewere) before and it could make sence.
I do have a lot of "footer" trades, however all the sites that are ranked in the top 10 for the keywords i got punished for do use an exact same strategy when it comes do "footer" trades.
I know the sites, most of them are people i do business with for over 6 years. Same work, same type of sites, same way of trading.
Only difference is that i got spammed on forums and they don't..

The quickest way to get a penalty is to link to a site that is either banned or under a penalty themselves. I believe that you don't necessarily get a penalty if there are a lot of crap links pointing to your site. I think google builds a backlink profile and if say you have a super high unusual amount of pr0 backlinks with irregular anchor tags they will apply a penalty. You can attempt to off set this with authoritative backlinks and bring your backlink ratios to a more normal ratio. I think there is some sort of tipping point where if too many of your backlinks look shady they drop your ranks. For example let's say you have 10k backlinks but only 100 of those backlinks have an anchor tag for your site title "Debauchery" google would send up a flag. Or if say all your backlinks say "free porn" or something. First thing I would do is thoroughly check your on site outgoing links for crap. Delete those guys. Then try to get a diverse backlink profile. Good Luck.

Also as a side note I have seen a lot of spammers ranking high for a lot of keywords that are clearly using a some sort of submission form spam bot.

I suspect that the folks at Sextronix will know who they are...if you click on any of the banners on those spam pages they all go thru TEXASCARSUSED.COM and all redirect to a Sextronix account # 113170

This is something which should be investigated.:thumbsup

jesus thats messed up. hopefully it didnt mess up your seo too bad.

Sextronix.. you there ?

I sent Itchy at sextronix an icq but haven't heard back from him yet. If anyone knows the folks over there you may want to send'em to this thread.

I know I'm late to this convo, but I do have quite a bit of experience with this. These links won't hurt you and you should not waste any of your time worrying about them.

There are a lot of myths in SEO, one of them being negative SEO. A lot of people out there think that it's possible to hurt your competition by building loads of spammy links, but it's simply not true. If this was possible there would be hellfire on the Internet.

If you're still worried, consider this. Google knows that it's easy to build thousands of shit links in no time, for a couple hundred bucks a month you can have a VPS running 24/7 building tens of thousands while you sleep. For $5 you can buy an xrumer blast on Fiverr. Because of this all those links carry no value and therefore can't hurt you.

In my experience this isn't true.. I don't think blogroll and footer links cause penalties, they're just devalued and therefore don't help much. This is because these kinds of links are typically easy to get and are usually obtained through link trades. (And yes Google can detect ABCD trades). There's a big difference between penalties and link devaluation.

Im back from days off I'll look into this and hit you on ICQ to see what can be done