Disavow & nofollow from same IP

[sparrowdog]

I'm a web developer, and as such, we run a bank of half a dozen dedicated servers.

I have 2 questions with regards to nofollow links

1. There's half a dozen sites linking back to us from the same bank of servers (across 3 different IP's but all in the same facility) because we have donated our web design services and we're a sponsor. It's not a paid link, it's a sponsorship. Should I still nofollow the link?

2. I run a couple of personal blogs on the same bank of servers. There's an absolute tonne of original content and a handful of links back to my shop. Because I own both sites, should I nofollow these links as well?

I am doing a massive cleanup before the Penguin pops his head out again.

[MarieHaynes]

Very interesting question.  No one really knows whether Google takes into account links from your own sites via the Penguin algorithm.  If you have an obvious network for links then I've seen that penalized via MANUAL review, but can Penguin get that?

Bill Slawski writes here about a patent that Google may use to detect paid links.  Part of the patent describes ways that Google could determine which sites are owned by you and devalue links between those sites.

Are sponsorship links unnatural?  It really depends on the nature of the sponsorship.  There are pages where you can donate $5 to sponsor some software and in return you get listed on a PR5 page along with other sponsors who have names like "cheap payday loans" and "online casino".  Those are unnatural sponsors.

Technically, according to the quality guidelines all sponsored links should be nofollowed.  However, if you have links from places that you have sponsored and you legitimately would have sponsored these businesses even if there was no followed link in it for you, then IMO it's very unlikely that you'll get in trouble.  With that being said, if you had hundreds of these links then a manual reviewer could probably pick up quite easily that something unnatural is going on.  The other factor to help you with making your decision is whether the other links on the page make sense.  Again, if they have a link to you and then other links that are obviously there so that people can get a link (and not because they make sense as sponsors) then I'd get the link nofollowed.

Your personal sites kind of follow the same rules.  If the links are ones that you would have placed even if they were nofollowed then they're probably ok.  Are they keyword anchored?  If so, then this can be seen as an attempt to manipulate Google so that's not good.

It's hard to give an exact answer, but in each case if you ask yourself whether the link was made with the intention of helping your Google rankings then you know that you probably should be nofollowing it.

[sparrowdog]

Thanks. I'm going to err on the side of caution and nofollow ALL of the links from my personal blog to my business. In the grand scheme of things, it makes up such a small percentage of links to our store. Our pagerank won't suffer. The sponsorships are literally 10 or 12 logos on a sporting club or surf club website. For those we made ourselves that I have easy access to, I have also done the nofollow as they're all living on the same bank of servers. (we donated the hosting space and websites as our sponsorship deal).

Others where we have just given money or time and have no control over, I'm comfortable that they're legit and wont' get penalised. Asking a volunteer at a surf club to nofollow a hyperlink will be met by strange looks

Staying away from dodgy $5 deals with a 40-foot pole.