Can too many internal footer links penalize a site?

[sirkevon]

A group of our popular pages have steadily been taken off Google since October for our major keywords, and we have only ever been speculating since what it is about those particular pages that is causing our dropped rankings.

We have four sites operating on different class IPs, yet we internally link them together as they were on one umbrella sites. The green box full of links on the lower left corner of the page is what I'm concerned with. Would either nofollowing or just completely removing those links benefit the site more than it could hurt it?

Right now, a couple of our category pages have been dropped from the SERPs, which were on the first page before the drop. They've been dropped completely out of SERPs but still indexed. I don't want to panic and resort to drastic changes to the site if it's not necessary, which is why I am wondering of those internal footer links are starting to become detrimental to the sites as a whole.

Any insight anyone can provide in this matter would be very much appreciated.

[edited by: coopster at 9:31 am (utc) on Jan. 2, 2009]
[edit reason] no personal urls please TOS [webmasterworld.com] [/edit]

[petra]

My advice would be to nofollow all external links as well as non critical internal pages (such as t&c, privacy, etc..) placed in your footer.

[sirkevon]

Thanks petra. Your suggestion actually brings me to a follow-up question about external links. If we have four sites selling different things and are on different class IPs but are under one umbrella site, if we place footer links to inner category pages cross-linking between all the sites, will those links still be considered external links because they're on different IPs?

I've been wracking my brain over this issue, trying to make sure our linking structure is legit and not triggering a google filter that is slowly but surely dropping our pages.

What I've gathered so far is that it's okay to cross-link if you have sites under different IPs so long as you do not cross-link on every page on your site. If this is the general consensus, the fact that our footer links are site wide means that's bad linking, right? I was thinking about removing our entire sitewide footer links and placing them on a separate page, and only selectively cross link to the other sites. Would that be a better idea?

[petra]

Yes, I would avoid footer links to any external sites (unless they're nofollowed). Alternatively, I would create a specific page (corporate) and add all your related sites there.

[nealrodriguez]

will those links still be considered external links because they're on different IPs?

g may be able to figure out you're the owner of those sites by matching whois info or if you're monitoring traffic with the same google analytics account.

[pageoneresults]

The green box full of links on the lower left corner of the page is what I'm concerned with.

How many links total? And where do those links sit in the order of things when you view source?

How many links on the entire page? Internal? External?