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The sites have decent DA and PA but most of the links in question are in blogrolls and sidebars rather than relevant bodies of content.  You or I would pick them straight away as paid links so I don't think it would take Google long to come to the same conclusion.

Thanks for your response.

I've pretty much done exactly what you suggested already. I've managed expectations from the day I joined the company.

I don't particularly blame the SEO agency because i've done the same sort of link building myself during my time in agencies.

I recently joined a retail company who have been using an SEO agency for a few years.  Having done a bit of link profile analysis i'm more than a little concerned that we're a sitting duck for the dreaded penguin.

My main question is should i focus more on the number of actual links pointing at a page or the number of linking root domains? For example one of our pages has over 18000 links pointing at it but from only 39 root domains (immediate alarm bells!!). Most of the links are exact anchor text fro one particular term.

So far we haven't been hit but i'm not naive to think we're out of the woods yet.