lucy24 - 5:53 am on Feb 16, 2013 (gmt 0)

why can't they simply remove them from your PR calculation if the links are certifiably bad?

How 'bout when the linking page itself should never have been crawled, by google's own guidelines? (The "ignore parameters" section of wmt.) Every time they happen to crawl a search-results page which happens to include a hit on one of your own pages, that gets translated into a link. Can the world's leading search engine really, truly not tell when it has landed on a search-results page? The mind boggles. If any page on your site mentions any human-- living or dead, real or fictional-- with any name less common than "Smith", you will wake up one day to a fistful of spurious links from every people-finder site on the planet.

Grr.