Footer Link in International Parent Company Websites Causing Penalty?

[LeverSEO]

Still waiting to look at the analytics for the timeframe, but we do know that the top keyword dropped on or about April 23, 2012 from the #1 ranking in Google - something they had held for years, and traffic dropped over 15% that month and further slips since.

Just looked at Google Webmaster Tools and see over 2.3MM backlinks from "sister" compainies from their footers.  One has over 700,000, the rest about 50,000 on average and all going to the home page, and all using the same anchor text, which is both a branded keyword, as well as a generic keyword, the same one they ranked #1 for. They are all "nofollows" but we are trying to confirm if the nofollow was before or after they got hit, but regardless, Google has found them.

To also add, most of sites are from their international sites, so .de, .pl, .es, .nl and other Eurpean country extensions.

Of course based on this, I would assume the footer links and timing, was result of the Penguin update and spam.

The one issue, is that the other US "sister" companies listed in the same footer, did not see a drop, in fact some had increase traffic.  And one of them has the same issue with the brand name, where it is both a brand name and a generic keyword.  The only note that I will make about any of the other domains is that they do not drive the traffic this one used to. There is at least a 100,000+ visitor difference among the main site, and this additional sister sites also listed in the footer.

I think I'm on the right track with the footer links, even though the other sites that have the same footer links do not seem to be suffering as much, but wanted to see if anyone else had a different opinion or theory.

Thanks!
Jen Davis

[GregB123]

Hi Jen. I'm curious to hear what answers you receive. Especially since they are NOFOLLOW links...

My understanding is that NoFollow links do not effect ranking at all - whether they are good or bad or even all have the same anchor text. That is supposedly a featuire of Google's Disavow tool - it let's you turn bad links into NoFollow links and make them "disappear".

I just spent many days working on a Disavow project, and the first thing we did to our spreadsheet of links was sort out and delete all the NoFollows. What a mess if we misunderstood the effects of NoFollows!

[Chris.Menke]

Well, if they were all nofollowed, it would be hard to suspect that they were the problem.  Still, thatsalotta back links! I think it's interesting that the other US sites didn't take that  same hit and that some of their traffic increased--almost as though the links to the main site disappeared and the link juice consolidated on the remaining links to the other US sites.

I've made a couple of mental guesses but there's just too much going on there without enough detail to put an educated guess down in writing.  I'd like to know if the links between the sister sites were spread evenly among all the sites, if the sites are all in the same market, and the outcome of the hunt to discover whether all the links were all nofollowed or not before taking a stab at it.

[LeverSEO]

To answer your question the links are evenly distributed, not only to the us sites, but the other European sites as well.

They are all selling the same industry products, although the site I'm talking about sells everything, the others are a smaller subset.

In other words, if we use pet products as an example, the main site in question sells all, dog, cat, hamster, bird, etc.  Another of the US sites sells the same animal group products, but just less product offering.  The other US sites sell only specific animal products, so one is dog only, another one cat, etc.  The other European sites again sell other animal groups, but a smaller product offering again.

And we have found that the links were followed before, the subsequently made them no follow after the loss.  All US sites are currently down in traffic over last year now.

[Chris.Menke]

So it seems the link network became a weight around your neck, so to speak.  If you didn't receive an unnatural links warning in GWT then it was an algorithmic smack and if those links were, in fact, the issue, then you may just draw a new baseline at you current levels and start working your way up again from there.

[EGOL]

I would get rid of these links.

I'll bet that very few people use them.

They "should not" be the problem since they are "nofollowed".  However, you never know what google is doing.

This massive number of links are going to evaporate a lot of pagerank.  No need to do that.

If it was really important to link to these other sites I would make one internal page such as "about us" or "our international sites" and link to them on that one page with a followed link.  That link will be anchored with the domain name or the official company name.