Penalty? NoFollowed Link Profile

[JABacchetta]

Could an abnormal ratio of nofollow links cause a drop in rankings? Our "Followed Linking Root Domains vs. NoFollowed Linking Root Domains" is 50/50... while our competitors have an average ratio of 90/10.

The reason for our abnormal ratio is that:

A) We're a relatively new site, with a small link profile so far.

B) We have a WordPress plugin that allows other publishers to add our content to their site (which has a nofollow backlink included).

And, as a followup question... if we removed the nofollow backlink completely, but still left the branded text there... could we potentially still benefit from it (our brand name being near targeted keywords that appear in the plugin content)?

[FedeEinhorn]

The way you are managing the widgets just fine, those links should be nofollow, as they are now.

If you haven't receive a manual penalty notification it could be just as you said, a new site, with few links. Keep working on it, post content, etc so you can earn links the right way.

Hope that helps!