Our link building strategy - affiliates and trophies

[sichristie]

Hey guys,

I just wanted to follow up on Rand's excellent whiteboard Friday: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/preventing-linkbased-penalties-whiteboard-friday

It got me worried I think, but I'm not sure.

We have a site where we are building up links in 2 ways:

1. We have an affiliate set-up. A search widget in an i-frame, and below the i-frame a followed link pointing to the relevant page.
   The anchor text varies for each affiliate depending which region the affiliate comes from.

2. We have awarded about 500 of our partners with trophies - i.e. - this partner has best reviews or most sales etc. Our partners are absolutely loving it.
   The trophy is an image link which they can embed on their website, with alt text only mentioning our brand - that was an oversight ( I think). I wish the alt had been dynamically generated for each partner.
   The trophies link to our partner pages.
   So we are getting many links to our deeper pages, which is great.
   The links I believe are relevant as they are coming from our partners websites and pointing to their relevant partner page on our website.

So burning question is. Would you consider these links dodgy given Rands recent whiteboard friday post, and the recent farmer algorithm change?

Many thanks,

Croozie

[NickPateman81]

'Post response' deleted my answer. I'll try and remember what I said!

I think Rand's WBF was focusing largely on new websites with link portfolios that consisted almost entirely of 1000s of 'dogdy links'. Provided that your website is aged (and it sounds like it definitely is) and that you have a mix of natural and 'artificial' links then you have nothing to worry about.

While I don't know, I would imagine that Google takes far more kindly to image links than text links; simply because text links have much more weight and therefore more power to manipulate.

Anyway, you have a totally legitimate link building strategy and I would suggest that even if your site was brand new there wouldn't be an issue.