How many comments is too many?

Hi, I've found a few good websites to leave my links on. Some of them have a high number of comment spammer links - as many as 200 to 300 sometimes.

Even if these sites have a high PR (and some of them are .edu) is it still worth leaving a link? Or would the site be seen as 'junk' cuz it is full of spam, even though it has a high PR?

This is based on my personal opinion, but usually I don't touch a page with spammed OBL in high quantities (seen bad things happen), my advice however if you really want to use these pages, create a link to a web 2.0 property, focused blog etc therefore avoiding directly linking and possible penalization.

Thanks, I've pretty much avoided them so far, and only used them for Web 2.0 so good to hear I've done the right thing. To be honest I can't see much good coming from linking from those sorts of pages. Wanted to check though as some of them were .edu sites and would have been a shame to have wasted them.

One other question about this actually.

So say I find an .edu, and one page has a few hundred spam links. But I find a page on this same .edu site which has only a dozen spam links; would it be bad to post a link on the low OBL page? Or would the entire site be a risky venture due to a few highly spammed pages?

Providing the site isn't infested with spam (as usually it's only one of two pages that contain vast amounts of OBL) then yes IMO that's fine. I have practised this myself, and a site of mine is on G's second page for terms 150 million plus without much targetting and so on, so I haven't seen any penalty yet, although that could be due to several other factors.

Just don't focus 100% on sites like these, variety is always the best policy.

All depends on the value of the target site, and the amount of time you have. Every site you get a link on carries some risk of being flagged as a spam link. Generally speaking, the higher the OBL, the higher that risk. Plus, link juice is drained away equally among all links, so not only is the risk greater, but the potantial reward smaller.

My personal rules at the moment are no common spam words present and <30 OBL for direct links to my sites. For web 2.0 I will go for anything below 200 OBL.

I believe that google identifies when a site is guilty of linkspam by analyzing the percentage of that site's backlinks that come from sites with a high OBL. Speaking in terms of probability, it is extremely likey that a site has been linkspamming if 50% + of its backlinks are from high OBL sites.