Word on the street is that links from the bad link communities / farms and unvaried anchor text in links throws up a Google flag. But then, mustn't Google assume that nobody would bother spending time linking up their competition in such ways. So my feeling would be that links from bad communities shouldn't hurt. They might not help, but if Google is to be fair, they shouldn't hurt. Same with overly repeated anchor text. What do you think?
Spot on mate. It definitely doesn't hurt, it just doesn't count as a back link I believe. Reason, as you said. If it did hurt I would busy building bad neighborhood links for my competitors or my clients' competitors to pull them down. They go down, I go up - simple as that. But if you link out to bad neighborhood, you can certainly face the wrath of search engines. Because you have total control on who you are linking to and if you do so, be ready to see some drop in rankings. In bound links on the other hand, I have no control on. I should not be penalized for someone else's mistake and I believe search engines would agree with it.
I agree with Nancy. If it will hurt then I just purchase links from bad neighborhood for my competitor.
Google's main concern isn't 'being fair to site-owners', it's providing relevant results to searchers. Whilst generally Google's policy is to ignore backlinks it 'doesn't like the look of', if something has happened in regards to your site that is badly effecting the search results, Google will drop it down or even out of serps because Google's main concern isn't 'being fair to site-owners', it's providing relevant results to searchers. (It's because buying bad links for a competitor can also skew results that it's generally just ignored - again, not because they care that boohoo someone's being nasty to my site , but an attempt to remove relevant sites has as bad an effect on the results as an attempt to artifiically promote irrelevant sites)