What's the news on sitwide nofollow links and anchor text penalties

[BobGW]

Is it possible to be penalized for sitewide nofollow links because of anchor text penalties, even if you use branded anchor text?

[Prospector-Plastics]

I posted a similar question the other day that may help a bit.

Dr. Pete posted a very good answer -
http://www.seomoz.org/q/too-many-noindex-follow-tags 

[BobGW]

That does help. However, I was asking if it is a problem in your backlink profile to receive nofollow backlinks that are sitewide.

[Prospector-Plastics]

Good question, I don't know the answer - but it does apply to our business, so I'll follow this discussion for insight. Thanks for asking this Bob.

[TomRayner]

You shouldn't receive any kind of penalty for doing so.

The premise of the nofollow tag is tell Google that "Hey, these links might be paid advertising, or could look a bit unnatural, so I'm going to whack a nofollow tag on them so you don't pass any link juice".  It then ceases to become a tool to manipulate the SERPs, so you're not doing anything wrong in Google's TOS.

I think that's pretty clear cut.  It's this scenario that nofollow was pretty much designed for. I'd never bet the mortgage with Google, but this comes close!

If we're talking site-wide links like footers to show that you worked on the site, from a personal POV I think that's a bit much and that a homepage link would achieve the same effect, but that's just me.

Hope this clears things up.