How does Google spam affect a site/what can be done?

[ianevans]

While looking into the problems discovered in [webmasterworld.com...] I decided to do a "mysite -site:mysite" search. It turned up over 13,900 links to our site.

While some of those were legitimate links to our site's event coverage and bios, thousands referenced data/images on our site but, when clicked on, none of those sites referenced us at all, but were merely link farms for adult sites.

I started looking at the postings here and I'm assuming this is what you refer to as "Google spam".

How much is an innocent site affected by this? Could this be part of the reason we've seen our photo pages disappear from Google Images? How do the Google spammers create these pages with our search terms and is there a way to defend/fight back?

Have a great weekend.