Sorry to interrupt the conversation between you two guys, but still didn't see anywhere the proof that inbound links can get your site penalised?

.. and in the absence of proof, I personally tend to base my judgement on what Google has to say about it officially, which is that links cannot have a "negative impact" on ranking.

How to report paid links
"We’ve always tried very hard to prevent site A from hurting site B. That’s why these reports aren’t being fed directly into algorithms, and are being used as the starting point rather than being used directly. You might also want to review the policy mentioned in my 2005 post (individual links can be discounted and sellers can lose their ability to pass on PageRank/anchortext/etc., which doesn’t allow site A to hurt site B)."

And I will stand by it until someone can prove otherwise, or at least provide some clues about how to set up a benchmark to prove that inbound links can damage a site.

Manu
<please add your link to your signature CD>