Does having a lot of spammy links to your site hurt you?

If my site theoretically has like 20,000 links all from spam sites, sites from China, etc. does that hurt the ranking?

Even if it doesn't help, can it hurt?

If it does, why? What if I'm not able to control who links to my site? This could be a strategy to hurt other sites by giving them a lot of crappy backlinks.

 

No it does not hurt you , Nyone linking you (specifically the spam sites)does not affect your site in nyway, yes!! if some gud site's with PR>4 puts ur link it's good for your site,

ElanTechnologies.com

 

yes i think it may hurt to site as well it may be considered as spam too.Coz the same case happened with me too.My site generated thousands of baclinks in a day,obviously frm some spamy blogs.And in result i lost all my original backlinks.

 

if you site have 20,000links but you traffic is like 2000 or 3000 daily so no problem but if you want ranking so its not possible

 

It's all about making the links look natural. If you have thousands of spammy links and no good ones you won't rank well! if you have lots of good links and add a few spammy ones they will probably help you a little, it's about balancing one against the other and making it look natural in Google's eyes, a few Spammy links won't hurt you, adding thousands won't get you banned but might encourage them to apply some sort of dampening factor which might damage you a little. There's not really enough benefit, if any, to Spammy links to make them worth pursuing. Concentrate on getting quality links and you'll find yourself doing much better

 

if your site is new it may be possible spam linking effect Google penalize your site .

 

Yes as you said the spammy link quantity is very high so it's possibility to get heart your site ranking some time due to spammy link google panalize also treat the site spammy

 

Nothing Will happen if some spam-my site gives UR links in there websites, U will be only affected if U ll give their links in UR site, As U R only penalized or go down in UR ranking due to wat u do ON-SITE , Nothing Else matters...

 

Yes, it does. Better go with few but quality backlinks, you'll rank easily that way.

 

I would like to believe that, having such tons of spammy links from other site shouldnot matter at all, because if it were so, anybody can hurt competitor ranking simply by pointing lot of spammy links to their site. But google has mind of its own, you can read the official word from Google here: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/10/dealing-with-low-quality-backlinks.html