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Hi Zach, Good question. In the old days, this was referred to as "PageRank scuplting" - a process where you would place the nofollow tag on your unimportant links in order to pass more value to the links you wanted to count. Then, in 2009, Google supposedly "plugged" the nofollow hole. Rand and team did a classic Whiteboard Friday on the topic. I still remember watching it the day it came out: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/whiteboard-friday-how-do-we-plug-the-nofollow-leak Today, you don't hear much about PageRank sculpting. Most SEOs don't bother with it, partly because of it's decreased effectiveness, but also in part because there are more effective ways of controlling the influence of links. This is where the issue becomes more complex. Link "equity" or PageRank, (or MozRank), is only one small factor in the overall value of a link. Anchor text, position on the page, and a host of other factors all influence how much influence any given link can wield. Here's a good introduction on the subject (again from Rand) Hope this helps! Best of luck with your SEO.

Assuming that the directories are indeed low quality, I'd say that you probably wouldn't be penalized for it, they'd be more likely to just devalue those links. The odds might increase if you were overzealous with exact match anchor text in your links, but that would probably be more of an issue with anchor text than an issue with those specific directories.

Thanks Ben, but we were using both majestic seo and open site explorer to get a look at as many as we could.  With 1.5 million back links it is almost impossible to see them all anyway. I appreciate your response.

Sweet thanks Josh for the info.