I probably should have made myself more clear, I am not talking about low quality links but mostly about links from sites that G knows that they are selling links, and usually those sites are of the highest quality (newspapers, leading sites in their industries etc)
...could be. I do try to get mostly related links (because I always like to get traffic in addition to link value for more benefit per link), but I do have some like you're talking about too. So, it would be an issue.
Please note that I am just stating some of my observations in general not for a specific site and also I never claimed and will never claim to be an expert, in other words what I am saying could be total BS
You may be on the right path as thats why matt cutts was asking others to be snitches and ratts figuring that high PR sites would sell links and the way of stopping those are by not giving back any pr or make the high pr being passed less relevent....so you may be correct thx malcolm