Hiya! I've got a relatively new domain, and one of my goals is to be 100% white hat, squeaky clean as I really would love to see my site succeed in the long term.
So far my linkbuilding efforts are going pretty well.
I'm beginning to buy some ads, and some of the bloggers I'm buying ads from don't use advertising networks, they just host your jpeg from their own blog... For the little picture that will show up in the side column of their blog should this be no-followed? And if it's not do we know if google assigns a penalty?
I'm ok with asking the blogger to do that, but I notice my competition is not (and I know they know better) so I feel like it puts me at a bit of a disadvantage.
Secondly - I'm 100% avoiding sites that sell text links (even ones with high pagerank, like pagerank 6), is this the right path to go?
I read this article from Matt Cutts and was wondering if this is still true, reputable sites that sell links maintain their pagerank but aren't able to pass pagerank?
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/text-links-and-pagerank/
"Reputable sites that sell links won’t have their search engine rankings or PageRank penalized–a search for [daily cal] would still return dailycal.org. However, link-selling sites can lose their ability to give reputation (e.g. PageRank and anchortext)."
so much bad behavior out there (or people who just don't know about no-follow) that it's really tough to find high pr sites that are willing to write about you AND are following all of the no-follow rules on their content (let alone not selling text links lol)...