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Should be fine. If there were 10 blogs that had the exact same links and structure it may raise some suspicion. Also, if this blog has hundreds of 'thank you' links, it may be a bit fishy. But it sounds like it could be natural for the user experience, especially if they mention a bit about why they are thanking each.

Hi! You won't find this data in OSE right now unfortunately, however you can the info from Facebook by adding insights for your domain, Hope this helps!

Crawl the sites and see if the url is somewhere on it? Query google with: site:website.com "the anchor text that could've been used" Bing used to allow the linkfromdomain query. That made things a lot easier, but they stopped supporting that a while back.

Thanks for the response Alan.  We haven't explored this route yet, but I am becoming more thoroughly convinced and am practicing some tips offered by another SEOmozzer.  I agree that it seems to be all in the blog selection.

Simply speaking, as soon as Google crawls a web page with a link to your site then you can immediately receive the benefits of that link. A few examples: you receive a link to your site from a popular story on the New York Times. That article will likely be indexed within 1 hour of it being published. You can then immediately begin seeing increased traffic. you receive a link from a "regular" site on an article which is mentioned on the site's home page "Recent Articles" block. Depending on the site's DA, the page will likely be indexed within a couple days and you will begin receiving the benefits after it is indexed. you receive a link from a regular site which is not promoted on their home page but instead is buried in the site. The site structure might be mysite.com/en/blog/articles/cars/2012/ford/sports-cars/mustangs/2012-mustang-gt. Well, that article may never be crawled and indexed in which case you would receive no benefit from the link. your link might be on a page which is noindexed or blocked by robots.txt which would not be seen Also keep in mind a link to your site offers two benefits: direct traffic from the linking site and any benefit to improving the ranking of your search results which Google offers to you based on that link. You can receive a direct traffic boost instantly. You may or may not ever receive a boost from Google based on the link. If the link is nofollowed then Google wont offer you any benefit. Many sites are penalized from Google by having their links devalued for various reasons. If you receive a link from such a site, there is no ranking benefit. The last point, Google will examine your site when determining a boost from the links. Are the sites linking in independent? If the sites have similar IPs, similar backlinks, same owners, use the same anchor text, etc. then Google will likely devalue those links.

I too work with a lot of bloggers who are given products to review for the purpose of link building and content. The UK has similar legislation which states the competition (or review)  was sponsored and the relation between the blogger and the company is clear. In terms of a 'no-follow' i haven't come across anything which states that the link must be 'no-follow'. I don't think these communities (such as the FCC) have come to understand the relevance of no vs do follow links, so I'd keep going with the follow links.