Are Footer Links Now a Problem for Google?

[asusplay]

In the last few days one of my sites lost quite a few ranking spots ongoogle despite no changes being made to it.

Now, I'm looking at different aspects and thinking whether footer links could have been the problem with Google seeing them as paid links and giving the site a penalty. The links aren't paid for (I don't sell or buy links, simply exchange if that), but I was wondering whether Google think they are paid links and penalises as a result.

Any ideas?

[roodle]

I have a homepage which has many 2/3-word anchor texts with the same keyword appearing in most of them, and as far as I can tell G doesn't seem to be bothered by it.

[annej]

Well my theory is that Google only notices repeated words in anchor text when there is a problem based on phrase based ranking.

It's all getting a lot more complicated so you kind of have to do some trial and error to see what will work. Do it on a small scale to see what happens.

[PowerUp]

As far as how Google bot sees my page, my site navigation bar is at the footer. Will this hurt my internal pages?