Could a large number of No Followed links in to my site have caused a penalty?

[tofftrader]

On 22nd Feb, I placed a text ad on a respected industry recruitment website. As the site has many pages, the webmaster made a point of NOFOLLOWING the links back to my site.

6 days later, my site lost 30% of its daily traffic overnight, and it's stayed there ever since.

I looked on Webmaster Tools just now, and it says that there are 125,000 links coming in to my site from the site I'm advertising on (even though the links are NOFOLLOWED).

Could this have triggered the fall in search traffic to my site?

Thanks for any feedback.

[Syed1]

It depends if yours is a high authority site or not. If its a relatively new site or with low-avg authority, it could very well have fallen under the 'fishy' side of the radar.

Its unlikely that nofollow links would trigger a penalty but the # of links you mention here is staggering so I wouldn't count that out.

Also, Google made 40 changes 5-6 days ago, which is when your saying your site traffic fell so it could be that as well:  http://insidesearch.blogspot.com/2012/02/search-quality-highlights-40-changes.html

[tofftrader]

Hi Syed, thanks for the feedback. I just think it looks suspicious - the sheer volume of links.

I'm aware of Panda 3.3, however the site has never been affected by previous versions of Panda... although, the sudden appearance of these nofollow links could have meant that the site fell into the Panda net I guess.