Incoming Links and "The Penalty"

The age old question

[dinnerware]

I have recently discovered a link farm has listed our site on their link directory. The difficulty is they will not remove it after emails, phone messages, etc. etc. My frustration is that Google is going to ban me for life as our PR is fine now but they are a link farm w/o question. I am not sure if a competitor submitted it or not. A friend told me that as long as I do not link to them than I am fine. Can someone PLEASE confirm this?

[ciml]

When it comes to confirming anything about penalties we need to be careful. Penalties change, and none of us (well, maybe one) knows what will be penalised next month.

There is a general view that "penalties" are be based on to whom you link, not on who links to you. In terms of PageRank, I can't see any risk. In terms of ranking for words in the page they link to, I wouldn't worry as long as you have a good number of 'natural' links to it as well.

[rfgdxm1]

Nobody but Google knows exactly what they do. However, I'd assume if the identify a link farm, they ignore links on it, and penalize based on links into the link farm. Just too trivial to add competitor's URLs to such.

[MHes]

"A friend told me that as long as I do not link to them than I am fine"

I agree. Google is very aware that a competitor should not be able to damage you by such an action. It is too obvious a trick not to have been addressed by Google, and I agree with rfgdxm1, the links will be ignored. However, linking to a link farm is bad news!

Don't lose any sleep about it, I'm sure this will nor affect you. I have several sites that appear on these farms as 'potential link partners'. I have never been affected to my knowledge. I usually get an email asking if I would like to participate (which I ignore) and eventually the link disappears. My rankings are stable either way.

[dinnerware]

Thanks for the valued input. As you say hopefully the link will resolve itself as we are very selective in whom we link to, etc.