No-Follow Tag and Advertising

[super99]

Hiya! I've got a relatively new domain, and one of my goals is to be 100% white hat, squeaky clean as I really would love to see my site succeed in the long term.

So far my linkbuilding efforts are going pretty well.

I'm beginning to buy some ads, and some of the bloggers I'm buying ads from don't use advertising networks, they just host your jpeg from their own blog... For the little picture that will show up in the side column of their blog should this be no-followed? And if it's not do we know if google assigns a penalty?

I'm ok with asking the blogger to do that, but I notice my competition is not (and I know they know better) so I feel like it puts me at a bit of a disadvantage.

Secondly - I'm 100% avoiding sites that sell text links (even ones with high pagerank, like pagerank 6), is this the right path to go?

I read this article from Matt Cutts and was wondering if this is still true, reputable sites that sell links maintain their pagerank but aren't able to pass pagerank?

http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/text-links-and-pagerank/

"Reputable sites that sell links won’t have their search engine rankings or PageRank penalized–a search for [daily cal] would still return dailycal.org. However, link-selling sites can lose their ability to give reputation (e.g. PageRank and anchortext)."

[TheEspresseo]

I do not think it is still entirely true that sites who sell links will not themselves be penalized (cf. Forbes). On the other hand I recently saw Graywolf joke about how the paid links from this high PR site pass PageRank. I would be curious to know whether anyone out there could demonstrate that paid link penalties for either the linking site or the site being linked to were algorithmic. And if they're not, we should expect them to be sporadic and inconsistent. In which case, if you are trying to be squeaky clean, it seems you should nofollow the links, and it seems that such would necessarily put you at a disadvantage to your competitors who are not. However, some of them, if successful enough, could get hand penalized by Google.

[super99]

omg thanks for sharing these articles. i am literally sitting here, laughing while i read them. just at the ridiculousness of it all.

does everyone get a friendly letter if they are selling links or is only forbes receiving such a thing? seems like favoritism if that's the case. not cool imo.

i'll go with the super squeaky clean and no-follow mine, and grumble all the way so much bad behavior out there (or people who just don't know about no-follow) that it's really tough to find high pr sites that are willing to write about you AND are following all of the no-follow rules on their content (let alone not selling text links lol)...