Questioning the Consensus of Penguin/Panda Backlinks Scare

So I have read about people rushing to delete all the junk backlinks because of fear of being penalized by the new algorithm. My question is, do spam links really damage your search ranks?

If so:

What's to stop every BHer from just SB blasting competitor websites with thousands of spammy, garbage links to get them penalized?

You are right mate that what everyone been talking about with negative seo

Deleting backlinks important if you built bad links via ALN and BMR or if you got notice in webmaster tools about unnatural link building.

Most dont need to worry about it, but again if you got warning you need to take action. not otherwise. I said it before but will say it one more time. Dont waste time deleteing or trying to delete backlinks yourself. Waste of time. Use a service like LinkDelete.com to have them manage your link removal. I had a couple sites recover from unnatural link penalty by using their service.

I would think that this penalty was a one off from google.

Google played us. Personally I would not remove the links.

I wouldn't waste my time removing links as Google has already indexed them and knows that you created them, but I can definitely vouch for the "rumor" that spammy backlinks can indeed hurt your site. It doesn't happen every time but it certainly does happen so the old adage of "every link is a good link" is no longer true.

There will be some that doubt the reality of negative SEO, but it's only because they haven't been through it, fortunately!