Is my page footer the reason keyword rankings have dropped?

[RobertHill]

Hi all,

One of my sites http://henstuff.com/ has seen some ranking drops for major keywords over the past few weeks and I was wondering if it was something to do with Penguin not taking a positive view of link-filled footers. It is something we are looking at phasing out but wanted to get the opinions of the SEOMOZ community.

Thanks!

Rob

[Aran_Smithson]

Hi Rob,

I don't think the keyword spamming i the footer is helping your cause. Also, your link profile is extremely heavily weighted towards "Hen Night Accessories".

You have over 1k links on that anchor text, though only from a few domains.

There are also canonical issues at play too. (your site is available under www and non www).

Thats my 2 minute analysis, but these could be core issues that need resolving.

Best of luck...

Aran

| <a class="clickable title link-pivot" title="See top linking pages that use this anchor text"></a> | | |

[lethal0r]

It would be a shame if the footer was the problem, because from a user point of view I get to the bottom of your page after browsing the products and then I see other pages I might want to visit. to me thats useful.

how is your site looking in google webmaster tools? did you buy any links? link buying has been punished heavily recently.

ive not checked your link profile but do you have many links with 'henstuff.com', 'henstuff' and so on as the anchor? perhaps you are over-optimising like aron mentioned, and could do with a more natural link profile.

[RichardTaylor]

You are a UK based company yet your TLD is .com

This wont help your UK rankings whereas having/using henstuff.co.uk would.

Also having a .com for a UK normally correlates to less UK searchers clicking on your site as they think it might not be a UK store.