From this thread I learned that starting with Panda, Google may actually be penalizing weak sites that are being linked to by spammy sites. Does this still hold true? I have a small site that has less than 20 links to it, and at least a quarter of them (according to Alexa) are coming from places like list-of-domains.org and stuffgate....sites designed to help people buy up websites that are named closely to yours (for later blackmail tactics, I suppose). I am working on a link-building campaign but these things take time obviously and I fear that links like these may be hurting me.

Follow-up question: 'Worthless' links (what I'd call links coming from sites that are not spammy but certainly not relevant to your site)...from my limited understanding, they don't hurt your ranking, tho they don't help. Is this still true as of the Panda update?

From this thread I learned that starting with Panda, Google may actually be penalizing weak sites that are being linked to by spammy sites. Does this still hold true? I have a small site that has less than 20 links to it, and at least a quarter of them (according to Alexa) are coming from places like list-of-domains.org and stuffgate....sites designed to help people buy up websites that are named closely to yours (for later blackmail tactics, I suppose). I am working on a link-building campaign but these things take time obviously and I fear that links like these may be hurting me.

Follow-up question: 'Worthless' links (what I'd call links coming from sites that are not spammy but certainly not relevant to your site)...from my limited understanding, they don't hurt your ranking, tho they don't help. Is this still true as of the Panda update?