Help needed: Effect of footer links?

I run a bunch of sites and employ the same SEO tactics on all. Most do very well, but two are languishing. These two are part of a network of about 60 sites that are all independently run on top-level domains, but share the same basic design and same branding.

These 60 sites are all interlinked through a network footer that appears on every page of every site in the "network." The footer is a list of every site in the network, linking to each.

So on these 60 sites, let's say there are 60,000 pages total. That means the Widgets site is receiving 59,000 incoming links from other top-level domains - but 95% of which are on unrelated topics. So about 57,000 incoming links from unrelated sites. With every page linking to every other site in the network.

Good or bad?

Could this have led Google to flag this "network" for circular linking, for being a linkfarm or a "bad neighborhood?"

thanks

 

What Google gonna do, is hard to answer, considering all the changes Google still doing on their algorithm.
Even though some links are unrelated, I think, they can have less value then related ones.

 

in my opinion, google may ignore footer links in future

 

I run about 8 sites on a similar basis and it's certainly not a big enough sample to show anything conclusive.

However I have noticed:

1. Footer links seem to have a negligible positive impact on the SERPS (though to qualify its a situation where the number of links does not seem to translate into an equivalent impact). My impression is that maybe only the first is really counted

2. Site-wide footer links are relatively useful to get particular pages indexed quickly. It almost seems like the brute-force linking is really helpful in that respect.

As I said - nothing conclusive in either - but certainly what I've observed from my experience.

Dylan

 

I think footer links don't work that good as they used to. Ah, I still use it nonetheless.

 

Footer links will be targeted first imo in the future updates.But it works now.

 

Thanks to everyone who has replied so far. Anyone else with thoughts on this subject, please chime in.

The sites in this network used to do very well in SERPs and traffic. But about 18-24 months ago, the network moved to a new CMS, a new design, and added the footer, and since them PVs have craters and pages that once ranked No. 1 for good keywords don't show up in the Top 100 results on Google.

I'm not authorized by the network owners to publicly reveal the name of the network or any URLs. But I'd love to get a PM from a few SEO experts who are willing to consider the fuller details, and also to take a quick look at a few of the sites to see if any glaring problems jump out.

thanks

 

Your network has probably been flagged....what you are doing can be easily detected....

 

Did the interior page URLs change when you switched CMSs? If they did you should be doing a 301 redirect from all of the old URLs (interior pages) to the new to preserve the links and PageRank.

Repeating the same block of text/links on each site and every page may be causing some of the pages to be flagged as duplicate and placed in the supplemental index - once it goes supplemental a page loses most of its link juice and it's ability to rank for all things other than unique strings of text.

 

Ive actually seen some great results in SERPs in the past for footer links or tag clouds ( same difference..)

Have carried out various experiments and always have been beneficial for interal links...

 

I havent used footer links ever for it suggest is that try it and test it cuz now a days it has some advantages as well
Cheers