Can our white hat links get a bad rap when they're alongside junk links busted by Panda?

[mikescotty]

My firm has been creating content for a client for years - video, blog posts and other references.

This client's web vendor has been using bad links and link farms to bolster rank for key phrases - successfully.  Until last week when Google slapped them. They have been officially warned on WMT for possibly using artificial or unnatural links to build PageRank.

They went from page one of the most popular term in Chicago for their industry where they had been for over a year - to page 8 - overnight.  Other less generic terms that we were working on felt the sting as well.

I was aware of and had warned the client of the possibility of repercussions from these black hat tactics (http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-google-makes-liars-out-of-the-good-guys-in-seo#jtc170969), but didn't go as far as to recommend they abandon them.

Now I'm wondering if one of our legitimate sites (YoChicago.com), which has more than its share of the links into the client site is being considered a bad link.  All of our links are legitimate, i.e., anchor text equals description of destination, video links describe the entity that is linked to.  Our we vulnerable?

Any insight would be appreciated.

[Carson-Ward]

Hi Mike,

I'm glad that you had the foresight to warn the client ahead of time. A lot of people are learning the hard way that quick-and-cheap link building methods can indeed cause penalties. My inbox is full of examples

Worry about links coming into your site that aren't legit, and links going out of your site that are irrelevant to low-quality sites. The fact that YoChicago.com happens to link to a site that has an unnatural link profile should be no problem.

[SEODinosaur]

I dont believe Google punishes sites for external links, they cant. If they did my competition would be F'd.

All the warnings and fuss is about "over stuffing keywords" on a page or doing other unnatural activity on a page.