Penalty for rapid linkbuilding apply to nofollow links too?

[tradewinds]

Hi,

This would apply to bloggers who digg all of their posts:

If I stuck to nofollow social bookmarking sites, and socialbookmarked every single one of my posts (2-3 per day), could they still cause a penalty in Google?

The reason I'm doing this is because I don't want to use social bookmarking sites for link juice (which is why I'm sticking with nofollow sites), but rather for actual exposure.

[wheel]

Not that I'd know, but I've never heard of such a thing. I don't see the benefit of such a penalty anyway. I doubt it's an issue with the SE's.

To put it another way, being able to discern a nofollow penalty would be bad for the nofollow tag anyway - such blatant manipulation by the SE's of the use of the tag (in direct contravention for what they've stated is the intent) would lead to all sorts of mistrust.

[jaffstar]

No Follow links are not carring any weight, therefore you would get penalized for doing something that could not impact or manipulate your rankings.

[wheel]

jaffstar, you're implying that nofollow links don't manipulate the rankings. You're not suspicious enough :) {/kidding}

Though less kidding - here's a thought. You're a search engine engineer. You don't (currently) use nofollow links as a ranking factor.

What do you use them for?

[jaffstar]

I do use a small ratio of no follow links to look natural :)

I also feel that some authoritive no folow sources ie facebook/youtube can count for something (small though) but I dont think that abuse of a no follow source can get you a penalty.

[tradewinds]

Wheel: Maybe for crawling? Or.. I have no idea..

[wheel]

Wheel: Maybe for crawling? Or.. I have no idea..

Remember, google doesn't hire search people, it hires statisticians.

They'd be looking at nofollows to see if there's any signs of spam...or something. Then applying that....somehow, I don't know.

But just because they drop the nofollow links out of the current link graph doesn't mean they don't use that data for other uses. In fact, I'd be surprised if they didn't analyze nofollow links for some sort of data or indirect assistance with the serps. Or some other nefarious purpose.

[gn_wendy]

Here is a related discussion on the topic of how google treats nofollow links

[webmasterworld.com...]