Hi Nicola -

Great question here. As Malcolm said, ad networks do not pass link equity. However, a banner advertisement that is not part of an ad network is technically a paid link (unless it's an embeddable badge or something). Often these will have referrer numbers on them as well. I think that Google devalues these when they see the referral code, but that is not for sure.

But, to be safe, I would add the rel="nofollow" to these links.

Hey guys -

Good question here. You are right, JFKORN, that the scenario I described in my post was where content that should be accessible to Google was hidden behind Javascript. Of course, Google is now indexing Javascript and can parse it quite well, so I'm not sure it still holds true, but I still recommend, to be safe, to not serve content using Javascript.

It seems to me, though, that you are asking the opposite. But what they are doing here seems to be legit to me. In my mind, it is not any different from simply using a collapsible DIV to put tabs onto a page, like on this page: http://www.rei.com/product/812097/black-diamond-posiwire-quickpack-quickdraw-set-package-of-6. I would actually say that it's fine to do this. But, be careful with the content because you do not want to get into "stuffing" the pages with keywords, which can hurt your rankings, even without an official penalty. I've seen this more as an assumed algorithmic penalty that then went away when the text was removed.

So be careful, but I don't think you'd be doing anything greyhat here.