links back to my site

[kakshaks]

About 4 months ago, a site offerred to write a review of 3 of my products and link back to the relevant pages on my site. Each review page contained 3 links back to the page (ie 9 links across 3 pages in total). The site is reputable in that they have several top competitors who have identical review pages back to their site. The link did not contain the nofollow tag and I am now being told by 'a reputable SEO company' that this has been damaging my rankings as the links were paid for.
They have referred me to http://www.google.com/support/webmas...y?answer=66736 to support their claim but I am seriously struggling to believe what they are saying is possible.
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Any thoughts?

[Duncan Rounding]

Google will discount the links so they will not aid your rankings.

[Mike Hughes]

As Duncan says, Google tends to follow a 'do no harm' policy for minor infringements. There are a couple of very good reasons for this approach:

1. It stops competitors from doing bad things to try and harm other people's sites.

2. It keeps them free from potential lawsuits along the lines of "We did nothing wrong and Google are destroying our business by wrongly favouring other companies."

So, in my opinion you're wasting your money but this isn't going to damage your rankings. Chances are the 'reputable SEO company' has looked at these paid listings to find easily led people with money to burn on SEO.*

Mike

* Assuming of course these aren't the same people pulling off the scam. Sucker people in with a cheap and easy proposition and then keep coming back with more expensive propositions once they find a live one.

[Chunkford]

Links will not penalise you, else all competitors will being trying to bomb you out of the SERP's.

The only time you will get into trouble is when they can prove without a shadow of doubt you have paid for links. e.g. on your website, that's in your control, offering a kick back for links - see here

What you have done with the articles should not cause you problems. The only thing that may happen is the value of the links have been removed because the site linking to you has been busted.