adder - 11:06 am on Sep 3, 2012 (gmt 0)

Same template wouldn't normally be a problem. If you look at wordpress sites, there are hundreds of thousands of sites that use the same template. For example, Atahualpa theme has been downloaded 992,350 times :)

The image with same anchor text... I would be slightly worried about this. Can you tell us more? What kind of site does it link to? Is it your site? Are these two sites interlinked? What's in your template footer? Are there any "dodgy" links there?

Another possible worry is "same linking strategy". Search engines are very good at detecting footprints. Besides, how can two sites have the same linking strategy? That's wrong! Is the content pretty much on the same topic? If yes, do you really need two sites?