Penguin Footer Links - Penalty or Devaluation?

[CsmBill]

One of customers provides IT Support for a municipality. The municipality's website (1000+ pages) has a footer link with the anchor text "IT Support" linking to our customer's site. The link is there for employees to get help. In mid summer, our customer's rankings tanked for "IT Support". It looks like a hit by Penguin. The question is, could removing the links bring the rankings back? Does Google's penguin algorithm penalize you for the footer links, or are they simply de-valued? Should we pull them down or no-follow them? If they aren't truly hurting their rankings, we would just leave them

[FedeEinhorn]

Yes, it does. Google penalizes links that pass pagerank and are built unnaturally, like those ones you mention. You should have the IT company set ALL those links to nofollow, that will accomplish both the company goals, avoid/remove a penalty while still providing the municipality site a way to go to the IT site.

Hope that helped.

PS: check if the IT company received a manual penalty under WMT to verify, and if they did, fix the issue adding a nofollow to ALL the links and then file a reconsideration request.

EDIT: most likely, if those are the only links you have, you received a penalty, as a devaluation happens when you actually have no control on the links, but in this case, the IT company placed the links on purpose.

[guillermoga]

Hi Rahul!

I recently answer a very similar question. Lynn Patchett comment was extremely helpful as well.

Check it out:

http://moz.com/community/q/are-reciprocal-links-with-a-pandalized-site-harmful

Hope it helps.