The late danish travel tycoon Simon Spies is famous (in Denmark) for having said that there is no such thing as bad publicity. He had a pretty scandalous lifestyle (lots of women, even more alcohol) but according to him the value in the increased name recognition all the scandals got him by far exceeded whatever contempt or dislike toward shis person they generated. Google makes Spies remark absolutely true. There's simply no difference between link in favour and links against a given site. Any mention, any hyperlink can only raise the awareness of the site by increasing the PageRank standings of the offending site.