What damage can internal duplicated hidden links do to rankings?

[AkilarOffice]

Hi, I have a rental website, www.akilar.com, for Spain. My question is, on the home page we have links to the seperate regions of the country. Somehow in the redesign of the site, these links have been placed on every page of the site and hidden in the code at the top. The links are there as well on each page in the header, these are additional. The page quantity is over 2000 pages. Also this is taking the internal links well over the limit. In anyones opinion what damage has this caused as our rankings of late have fallen. Thanks very much for your help!

[fablau]

Yes, I think any kind of hidden contents may be damaging. Have you noticed traffic drop right after that change? Was that the only difference applied to the site?

[AkilarOffice]

Hi Fabrizo, Thanks. As we restructured pages they would rise, get to about position 11/12 then start falling. This was just noticed in the code as was not supposed to be in the template as it seems. Frankly noticed it once we ran the site through here. Thanks

[fablau]

Yes, I think that may be definitively a possibile cause for your lower rankings.  Can't you rewrite those links in a  way to make them visible?

[AkilarOffice]

Hi Again, Thanks for your comments and confirmation. We have now removed all of them so hopefully will be a major help! Thanks again

[fablau]

Great, you are very welcome! Please, keep me posted with your recovery progress.

All the best,