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Can I be penalized for NOFOLLOW links?

Dave, I know that the NOFOLLOW attribute was introduced to prevent PageRank bleed through blog comment spam, but now that my site is automatically creating those NOFOLLOW links, I'm afraid that the search engines might assign some negative karma to the "linked to" domain, which would be my own. Is that something I should be worrying about? Thanks, Steve.

Dave's Answer:

An interesting question, and for those of you reading who aren't sure what the NOFOLLOW attribute does, I recommend What's the NOFOLLOW attribute? as background reading.

I appreciate your concern here, but I assure you that this is not a threat and is not anything to worry about, Steve. If nothing else, realize that blog comment systems now automatically add nofollow and that good bloggers (imo) add comments of their own to nurture the dialog. Wouldn't it be a bit, um, bizarre for me to be hurting my own PR or ReputationRank (coming soon to a Google algorithm near you) by commenting on my own articles? :-)

There's a larger issue here too, in that Google and similar search engines can't penalize you for links that point to your site. Otherwise I could cause you no end of grief by picking a really heinous site, say a hate organization that's been banned by Google, and then adding a bunch of links to your Web page. If links out of your control could adversely affect your ranking, you'd be up a creek and, generally, malicious (or should I say "overly competitive"?) business people could then attack their competitors without any recourse.

As a general rule of thumb Google doesn't penalize you for inbound links.

I hope that puts your mind at ease.

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Comments

thanks... the post was useful because I was searching for the exact question... "can i be penalized..."

Posted by: androo at June 26, 2007 12:14 PM

This is unfortunately not true, you CAN be penalized for links that point to your site. I have gotten that I do not own sites penalized in Google. Its not easy, it takes about 8 months of aggressive linking to bad neighborhoods and costs a few thousand dollars plus a lot of time but it can be done.

Posted by: THC at January 27, 2009 1:44 PM

Ofcourse you can get penalised for links.... but never banned!, but only if you are really stupid and dont have a clue on what looks natural and what doesnt, i.e 10,000 links from one high PR domain is really bad.... IE trying to buy juice.10,000 links accross 10,000 sites that are of similar theme are really really really really good!

Posted by: colin at June 10, 2009 11:33 AM

I have a lot to say, but ...

I have a lot to say, and questions of my own for that matter, but most of all I'd like to say thank you for all your efforts on this Web site by buying you a chai!

I do have a comment, now that you mention it!