Serious Question: Should we be happy when a blog links to us?

can google see the difference between bought links or a filter may happen?

[walkman]

After noticing a few sites that aren't doing well at all, and talking to some people, many of their sites IMO are filtered out because Google suspects link manipulation. Traffic drops 80-90% because enough, or all, of their back links are ignored apparently (that is my theory.) So, should we cheer or jeer when a relatively related blog links to us? Personally, I got this nice blog link and I was happy, but then I thought, what if Google doesn't like it as it crawls the 100's of pages with my link on them?

I did NOT ask for it, and my link is between 10-12 similar sites, but still. So far Googlebot has doubled it's spidering and I get fresh cache daily + more and pages are coming out of supplementals. I rank fine for homepage, but I am hoping that after my pages are all indexed, the rest will change as well--unless google sandboxes me. My site is as old as Google more or less, and I have had some issues, but now they're cleared thanks to a re-inclusion.

My question: can google really see when a link is bought or not? I wish they'd check the suspect sites manually, but I am not sure. Plus, I think Google penalizes the site, instead of simply ignored that suspicious link (It does not happen to all sites, I know.)

Thoughts?

[nonni]

The classic answer is that you don't have control on other sites that link to your site; you only have control on who you link to.

If Google decides that someone who links to you is a bogus nitwit, and they reduce the value of the nitwit links to zero, it won't hurt you (except that if a large percent of your inbound links are devaulued, your site might drop somewhat).

Sites have been fluctuating a lot in the results lately - don't assume that these links have anything to do with your sites performance.

In theory, there could be some progam to detect link-rigging schemes and penalize both the link giver and link recipient. But there isn't any clear evidence of that as far as I know - mostly, suspect links are simply ignored, but the site lives on in the index. It usually takes more to get zapped.