Can Linking Between Your Own Sites Excessively Be a Penguin No-No?

[RCNOnlineMarketing]

I have a bunch of travel-related sites that for a long time dominated google.com.au without any intensive SEO whatsoever. Aside from solid on-page content and meta tag, I did no link building.

However, all of my sites are heavily interlinked, and I think they are linked with do follow links and lots of anchor texts. Here are a few of them:

www.beautifulpacific.com

www.beautifulfiji.com

www.beautifulcooklands.com

My idea in inter-linking them was to create a kind of branded "Beautiful" nexus of sites. However, when Penguin hit -- which I believe was on April 27th -- search traffic crashed, and has crashed over and over again.

I've read that Penguin penalized over-optimization vis a vis anchor text links. I don't have a lot of inbound links like these, but they are everywhere among my sites. Is it possible that all of my text links have hurt me with Penguin?

Thanks to everyone in advance for your time and attention. I really appreciate it.

-Mike

[GeorgiaSEOServices]

I don't think that the drop you're seeing is a result of your inter-linking. If anything stands out more than another, it would be what the text links say.  For instance, on http://www.beautifulcookislands.com/, you use the word "resort" and "resorts" over twenty times just on the home page and your navigation is even worse:

Luxury Resorts
Deluxe Resorts
Standard Resorts
Budget Resorts

And this practice runs rampant on all of your sites. It's fine that they're a family of "beautiful" sites, but your problems are almost definitely stemming from keyword stuffing, which is also part of the Penguin updates. You wording is very unnatural and that sticks out like a sore thumb to Google. Get that under control and you should be able to recover in a few weeks or less.

[RCNOnlineMarketing]

That's helpful insight, Chris. Thanks. What if we just nofollowed a bunch of those in-text links, rather than having to come up with new writing? But that be just as effective do you think?

[GeorgiaSEOServices]

Not really. That will simply keep page rank from flowing, but it doesn't fix the root of the problem. It's not necessary to re-write everything. You just need to clean it up. For instance, instead of using:

Luxury Resorts
Deluxe Resorts
Standard Resorts
Budget Resorts

You simply have a drop down box that says "Resort Type" and then the dropdown says:
Luxury
Deluxe
Standard
Budget

That one change alleviated 4 "resort" references. Plus it's more user friendly and easier to read. There are many consultants (like us) that can also repair your content if you don't want to do it yourself.  It just needs to be natural and the way the verbiage is currently, it's viewed as keyword stuffing.

Structure the site to the user and not to Google. Your ultimate goal is a sale and your current sites are kind of tough to read because you've exerted too much energy into pushing keywords into the content. It may take a couple of days per site to scrub out, but it will be worth it in the end.