What makes a backlink bad??

Backlinks with very high number of OBL (out bound links)
 
In my opinion bad link is the link that looks unnatural.
I have no idea how to process that algorithmically only the manual way.
 
What if i have some XXX sites and I also have an "entertainment website" and my xxx sites contain sitewide backlinks to the entertainment site (thousands of links from each XXX site)?
 
What if i have some XXX sites and I also have an "entertainment website" and my xxx sites contain sitewide backlinks to the entertainment site (thousands of links from each XXX site)?

Then the 'entertainment site' is part of the XXX link neighborhood.
 
In my option paid links and posting links to unrelated your niche are bad links.
 
google has a big tummy , it tastes juice of every link.

all depends upon ig BigG will like/dislike it then it will good/bad.

-=-
 
Well the theory I have is as follows

Code:
If number of pages indexed in google < 20 
        Bad Link -> Catches Banned Domains, and small sites with no content.
Else If Domain is Less Than 1 Year Old
        Bad Link -> Catches alot of socialbookmark\site info\copycat type sites, that are nothing more than link farms.
Else If Domain Authority is Less Than 10
        Bad Link -> These sites tend to be just plain crappy
Else If The page has More than 75 OBL with Less than 50% of them going to our site.
        Bad Link -> Site is probably a Spammy Link Magnet and if not Big G will probably think it is anyway.
Else If Anchor Text is used for > 25% of links
        Bad Link
Else
        Good Link

I also treat follow and no-follow links as the same for this test.

I have run the test on 5 sites, and I broadly agree with the results, I'm not saying it won't give any false positives, and I'm not saying it will catch every bad link, but it gives a good starting point to manually check from, which is great when you have 10000s of links to check :-)
 
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Domain age is good. I'm not sure on PR these days, it seems to me that it is getting more and more unreliable there are plenty of "bad links" on high PR sites, and vice\versa.

How do you measure relevance in an easy to understand manner??

Outbound Links I get, that's an easy one, but inbound links, does that mean if a site has spammy inbounds, that reflects badly on the outbounds (Which makes sense). If so how deep do you analysis inbound links??

The bad links on high PR sites will still be penalized - think comment spam on .edu blogs. I've got no formula to quantify relevance at the moment, but my general sense is that you should stick to socials/bookmarks/2.0s/niche relevant blogs and forums. Maybe some high quality directories, etc. If you're selling baseball products, why link to a .edu blog post about a snow day in 2012 that has hundreds of other spammed links? Yes the root domain has high PR, but G is likely not looking at that link favorably (not just because of irrelevance but also high OBL, etc.)

Not sure about the extent to which one should analyze the inbound links. Similar to relevance, a general overview can be illuminating. Would be interested in hearing another (more fully elaborated) opinion on that matter as it's a good question drumltd
 
Add broken html to the list, bad neighborhood sites (if the site is on a shared host), inbound links to name a few.
 
One more factor may be the relation between the backlink and the content
 
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