Interlinking to Other Sites - Are they Hurting my Google Ranking?

[bekyed]

Hi,

We have links in our footers and sidebars to our other websites on different servers, is this affecting our rankings in google as we were in the top 5.
I have heard about sitewide links that they can penalise a website.
Any information is helpful here as we have tanked considerably since a few weeks ago.

Thanks.

Wayne.

[skweb]

No evidence exists that interlinking is bad. We have it on a dozen websites without penalty. What can hurt for a short period of time is if you have interlinked website and you add thousands of links at once - it can happen when you add a link in a blog template.