Links via scraped / cloned content

[McTaggart]

Just been looking at some backlinks on a site - a good proportion of them are via Scraped wikipedia links or sites with similar directories to those found on DMOZ (just they have different names).

To be honest, many of these sites look pretty dodgy to me, but if they're doing illegal stuff there's absolutely no way I'll be able to get links removed.

Should I just sit and watch the backlinks increase from these questionable sources, or report the sites to Google, or do something else? Advice please.

[SEODinosaur]

IMO focus on building good links for your own site. It is completely up to you, however the time you invest trying to get them removed is probably better off spent branding your own site. If they are doing wrong things they will end up getting it. Everyone who f's with the big G eventually gets it.

[OlegKorneitchouk]

Yup, you can't control the bad links coming in so your best bet is to develop your brand (buy building high quality links w/ brand anchor text) to reduce the impact of spammy links.

[McTaggart]

Thanks Donnie and Oleg - good advice there! Couldn't believe how many dodgy sites were hitting this particular site. Around 15% of links (out of not many links - around 300) from dodgy outfits all doing more or less the same kind of stuff.