Too many nofollowed blog comments with exact anchor text

[UnderRugSwept]

Back in my dumb days, I decided to use Fiver to get 25 backlinks from .edu sites. Well, they were all nofollowed, and they share space with hundreds of other sites spamming them. Top top it off, all the spam links for my site are exact-match anchor text: embroidered patches.

If you look at my link profile in OSE, it looks so polluted with these. I'm just looking for post-Penguin opinions about this--if it has the potential to hurt.

Since Penguin, I have moved to the #1 position for the KW embroidered patches, but I am still scared that future algorithm tweaks will incorporate this blog comment spam.

What do you think?

[zigojacko]

This could potentially cause your website to suffer but it's all about ratio and balance. If the majority of your website's link profile is made up of these types of links, then it would be a good time to build some natural links to counterweight the existing ones.

As long as the positive metrics outweigh the negatives, generally, you should be fine. Just building some links with varying anchor text to the same page should ensure that you're website doesn't get hit further down the line by one of Google's black and white zoo animals.

[UnderRugSwept]

Black and white zoo animals--funny. Those are really the only bad links; it's just that they are on high-authority sites, so when you look at my link profile, they're dominating the first two pages, so it looks so bad. But the rest of the links are fine, so I guess I won't worry too overly much.

[irvingw]

"it would be a good time to build some natural links to counterweight the existing ones."

yes exactly, and use completely different anchor texts, stay away from any variations of "embroidered patches"

look at some of the sites that are linking to you and if there are some easy quick wins, like a sitewide link on a bad site with a large index, and has webmaster contact info ask to get it taken down. Sometimes offering $20 via paypal helps get a webmasters attention.

[UnderRugSwept]

That's a good idea about the sitewide links thing. I have 12,900 links from one site, so that must be a sitewide thing. The good news is, the rest of my link profile is good, with a lot of varying anchor text. Maybe that's why I haven't been hurt by this one bad thing.

[EGOL]

Since Penguin, I have moved to the #1 position for the KW embroidered patches

Nice work!  WooHoo!