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Here's the challenge. I am doing some SEO triage work for a site which offers a legitimate business for sale listing service, which has a number of  FOLLOWED link placements on news / newspaper sites - like this:  http://www.spencercountyjournal.com/business-for-sale. (The "Business Broker" links & business search box are theirs.) The site has already been penalized heavily by Google, and just got pushed down again on May 8th, significantly (from what we see so far). Here's the question - is this the type of link that Google would perceive of as paid / passing page rank since it's followed vs. nofollowed? What would you advise if it were your site / client? From everything I've read, these backlinks, although perfectly legit, would likely be classified as paid / passing pagerank. But please tell me if I'm missing something.  My advice has been to request that these links be nofollowed, but I am getting pretty strong resistance / lack of belief that these links in their current state (followed) could be harming them in any way. Would appreciate the input of the Moz community - if they won't believe me, and the majority here agrees about nofollowing, maybe they'll believe you. Thanks! BMT