Tons of .info spam links - is this potentially bad?

[Joshmc]

Checking webmaster tools today and saw a large site that i work with has hundreds of .info domains linking to it. These are completely off topic spam and i have no idea why they would be linking to this site. Should I be worried about this? The site has a decent link profile but these .info links are making up a decent percentage now since there are so many.

[goodroi]

I am more worried when working on a site and it doesn't have those garbage .info links. The .spammy info sites tend to link to anything that ranks well in the serps. It is generally not an issue.

Have your rankings & traffic changed?

[Planet13]

@ goodroi

I am more worried when working on a site and it doesn't have those garbage .info links.

Could you elaborate on this a little bit?

[goodroi]

Often these .info scraper/spam sites simply grab the top ranking sites in the serps and start linking to them. If you don't have backlinks from these sites it means you do not have strong placement in the serps. I don't actually want the links from these automated .info sites. What I want to see are signals that my sites are performing well in the serps and this is one of those signals.

It is like having people infringe on your copyright. You don't want that to happen but it is a sign that your copyright is popular. I think we would all like to see signs that our copyrighted material is popular. If no one else ever mentions your copyrights then it is likely a sign of no one caring about your content and that is not a good thing.

[Joshmc]

Thank you @goodroi that makes a lot of sense and does make me feel better about the links.