Planet13 - 6:29 am on Feb 14, 2012 (gmt 0)

Link building comes from lots of areas. Guest posts, Blog posts some homepage links and the standard stuff everyone does as well.

I have to ask what "and the standard stuff everyone does as well" means exactly. (I'm not trying to make a moral judgement; just seeing how likely a penalty is.)

Also, when you say, "some homepage links," would it be fair to say that you paid for those?

How can I check for spammy link blasts from competitors? I ran a Majestic and Seomoz report but I didn't see anything there.

Yeah, Majestic and Seomoz would be my first choices for checking spammy backlinks. Although you might search for your domain name in quotes along with, say, the name of a particular male medication that starts with a V in quotes, and see if they exist on the same page / blog somewhere.

So do a search for:

"yourdomainname.com" "v*****"

and see what comes up (pardon the pun).