Potential penalty for using paid reviews?

we want the review, don't care about links

[gmac17]

Advertorials work very well for my company, and we'd like to use some paid review sites. We'd be doing this entirely for the reviews, not for the links (we'd even be fine with a no follow).

If G has identified sites as selling links, do we run a risk by being associated (reviewed) by those sites? If we had the reviewers use nofollow would this change anything?

I want the reviews, but don't want to be put into a "suspicious link buyer" category (even though many say you can't be penalized, the links would just be worth nothing).

[tedster]

Google asks you to prevent paid links from passing PageRank. If the links have a rel="nofollow" attribute, then you have no worries about either ranking penalties or PR demotion. The links can still bring your direct traffic, but Google drops them from their web graph so they don't affect ranking.

[ecmedia]

You are taking the right approach by insisting on the nofollow tag but what has happened recently is that all the pail link sellers have lost pagerank and I believe are in some kind of a "blacklist" by Google. So even if you have the nofollow tag it is better not to work with any of the paid link brokers or bloggers. You can directly approach some of the bloggers that make sense to your niche and deal with them directly.

[gmac17]

Thanks EC. I know a lot of the sites have been slapped, but I'm hoping G is smart enough to say "if you are being lilly white by putting in a no follow then we're smart enough not to penalize you"