Does google penalize sites that offer a blog icon?

[teehx1138]

We have a two year old, alexa ranked top 3000 site that has recently suffered a site-wide -950/-30 penalty, and we're currently trying to figure out what triggered it.

We recently added a feature that allowed sites to 'add our icon' to their blog to track their traffic. It's a small icon much like those digg/technorati icons you see on blogs. I've read in this forum that links from 'bad' sites can cause problems but I don't know if a non-keyword link like this below could trigger it :

<a href='example.com'><img src='example.com/img.png'></a>

I don't see why it would since many sites offer those blog icons? Is it considered a non-natural link even if we're not buying it?

We're simply trying to eliminate any possible problems to get the penalty lifted since our webmaster tools panel shows nothing wrong.

Any insight would be much appreciated.

[incrediblehelp]

No way they would. look at all the blogs that rank fine with them.