Backlink Profile Cleanup After Manual Penalty. Important To Concentrate on NoFollowed Too?

Hello all,
On the 16th I received the ever-dreaded manual penalty notice in GMT. At first it was only a partial match "Unnatural links to your site?impacts links" but then later in the day the sitewide version came in as well. None of that is particularly important for the question at hand I don't think, but worth mentioning maybe.

After carefully reviewing the backlink profile of this site, this appears to be a rare instance where a recovery effort is called for, and actually has a good chance of succeeding. Hopefully anyway. Corners were cut when the site was new and I had literally zero money for investment, and a dire need to start bringing revenue into the house ASAP. That being the case I built quite a lot of web 2.0 sites/articles/profiles type links to the site at first. However, after that early period we started gaining actual organic, editorial links from a few sites in our niche, as well as a few in a very closely related niche. So, I believe that if we can get rid of ALL the early low-quality, self-placed links (we will be taking the machete approach, not the scalpel approach), while leaving the organic ones, a "full" recovery may be possible. Full being in quotations because obviously removing/disavowing all those links will mean that the ranks won't fully come back right away, just the penalty lifted so that they CAN eventually come back. With quality links received later on.

There's the quick and dirty background story. And here is the question. In my WMT account we are currently looking at 2,700 links from 170 domains. A significant amount of work no matter how it's done. However, whether or not you need to worry about the NoFollowed backlinks would have a very significant impact on exactly how much work there is. It would seem to me that since nofollowed links do not pass authority/page rank it wouldn't really matter. On the other hand most of us know that nofollowed links do have SOME impact, and we also know how darn picky Google can be with reconsideration requests, so it becomes a tough question. Opinions?

Either way I will, of course, concentrate on the followed links first as they are obviously more important. But less important doesn't mean not important at all, so I am still concerned a bit about what to do about the low-quality/self-placed nofollowed backlinks in the link profile. I'd be interested in hearing others opinions and reasoning, pretty please!
Cheers!
MM

Not a single opinion on the seemingly quite important question of whether or not nofollowed links are important to go after during removal/disavow campaigns?

Anything that is low quality and looks like self placed must be removed, either is a no follow or do follow. If you have guest posts then I've got bad news, you have to remove that as well.

So bottom line is remove everything that is low quality, doesn't look natural or is self placed because any attempt to build a link is SERP manipulation and Google does hate that. SERP manipulation = penalty.

Thank you. I did indeed end up finding a direct quote from Mueller over at Google regarding this though and apparently you should NOT include nofollow links in your disavow file. When you add a link or domain to your disavow file apparently is what that does is basically make those into nofollow links. They still show in WMT and everything, but when google crawls those pages and links it basically adds an internal nofollow tag to the link.
The other piece of good info I found regarding this is about comments. Those are just for your own use I guess and completely unnecessary. It is all automated so nobody is reading those comments. That will save me some trouble (although notes are still important for your reconsideration request if it's a manual penalty).


Here is the relevant quote regarding inclusion of nofollowed links in your disavow file.

"You don't need to include any nofollow links...because essentially what happens with links that you submit as a disavow, when we recrawl them we treat them similarly to other nofollowed links," Mueller said. "Including a nofollow link there wouldn't be necessary."

Thank you very much for your response. However, that is apparently not correct my friend.
I did indeed end up finding a direct quote from Mueller over at Google itself regarding exactly this topic. It turns out that you should NOT include nofollow links in your disavow file. When you add a link or domain to your disavow file apparently is what that does is basically make those into nofollow links. They still show in WMT and everything, but when google crawls those pages and links it basically adds an internal nofollow tag to the link.
The other piece of good info I found regarding this is about comments. Those are just for your own use I guess and completely unnecessary. It is all automated so nobody is reading those comments. That will save me some trouble (although notes are still important for your reconsideration request if it's a manual penalty).


Here is the relevant quote regarding inclusion of nofollowed links in your disavow file.

"You don't need to include any nofollow links...because essentially what happens with links that you submit as a disavow, when we recrawl them we treat them similarly to other nofollowed links," Mueller said. "Including a nofollow link there wouldn't be necessary."

Yea, it's not correct. Lol...