Are these incoming links hurting our rank at Google?

[Ook_Ook]

I was brought on board a bit ago to help manage an existing site. I noticed in Webmaster Tools that these 5 sites (among others) have a ridiculous amount of links to our site. They are the kind of sites that looks like a blog generated by rss feeds, with a couple of links in the right column. Many of the blog posts are malformed, leading me to believe that the sites are no longer being maintained.

sketchysite1.net 8,927 links : 1 linked page
sketchysite2.net 6,215 links : 1 linked page
sketchysite3.net 5,670 links : 1 linked page
sketchysite4.net 3,385 links : 1 linked page
sketchysite5.net 2,435 links : 1 linked page

I am having difficulties determining how our site got listed in the first place. No one seems to know anything about it. Am I correct in assuming that these are harming us and I should get the links removed as soon as possible? I think the answer is obvious, but I wanted to check with you guys.

[tedster]

It's very unlikely those links are hurting you. If that's all it took, everyone would be trashing their competition all the time. You can control who you link to, but not who links to you.

[deadsea]

A few years ago I released a widget that was picked up by a large network of p-orn sites. Each of the 150 or so sites was linking back to me. In addition to being p-orn, the sites were cloaking for googlbot and employing a number of other blackhat techniques.

Fortunately, nothing bad came out of it for my site. The p-orn network used my widgets for almost two years.

[metalhead]

One of our sites had 200,000 bogus links from a site with session ids in the URL. After a few weeks I noticed a massive ranking drop for our site. It's a pretty small site with only 50 or so real backlinks so I'm pretty sure the drop was caused by those other links. After about a year the links weren't shown in WMT anymore and our site gained its original ranking back.

[Pjman]

So links that hurt you can be seen in WMT? I wonder if that is true. It would really help us monitor our site. Somebody should ask MC.