Can you tell if a site is in a "bad neighbourhood"?

Hi all,

I'm just looking for links at the moment for a site I am SEOing and I'm coming across lots of directories with resonable PageRank and backlinks in Google but I am concerned that some of them are obviously SEO sites and I was wondering if there is any way to tell whether they are in a so-called "bad neighbourhood" or not? Is there some kind of list somewhere or is it just a guess? Also, if you do get a link from a bad site will you get penalised or will the link just not count?

Thanks for your help

Links from a site to you will not hurt you...PERIOD.

If you link back to them however, that is different. I would only link back to a site if they:

a.) aren't obviously a link farm that exists purely to generate links (Legit Directories not included)
b.) didn't have a grey PR bar
c.) were indexed by google - just type their url into the searchbox (brand new sites won't be there so that is the exception)

Ah okay thanks - that helps a lot. Just one more question though, is a grey PR bar different from a bar with 0/10 PR? I don't think I've ever seen a grey PR bar so I just wanna be sure what I'm looking for...

Oh yes, there's a difference.

Note: some of the new - and some of the old - threads here have a grey bar. It can both mean the page isn't spidered yet, or it is banned in a way. Take your pick ;)