Just identified and reversed a severe footer links penalty - any similar experiences out there?

[McTaggart]

Just seen my first rather dramatic sitewide footer links penalty. Virtually all organic search traffic fell off site for 3 months. The footer links were a mix of keyphrases targeted at internal pages and keyphrases targeted at a handful of other associated companies (a group of enterprises owned by same businessman, with websites hosted in the same place). The website developers felt they were improving search engine visibility.

Anyway, as soon as I started work with this client I requested immediate removal of the footer links and traffic immediately recovered to pre-penalty levels (within a couple of days).

Have any of you experienced anything similar?

[artdivision]

Hi Luke,

I have used footer links a lot and I have never ever experienced a penalty. However there are a couple of things you need to be aware which might resulted in your ranking drops / re-recover.

1) footer links are bad for SEO when linking to other sites or when other sites link to you. There is no harm if you link to your internal pages/landing pages and besides search engines tend to ignore footer links 
2) Your main page is the page with most domain authority. The more footer links you add the more link juice you pass to those pages. If you added too many you might  over-dilute the home page link juice meaning an overall drop in rankings.
3) You have to remember that only the first link on the page to a specific URL is counted. So if for example you have on the main menu or content a link to product X as "product X" anchor and then you have on the footer a link "best product X 2013" with both links to the same product x page then google will ignore completely the latter as it's worthless.

In your case it is possible that you had many footers and passed all the juice to lets say 10 pages meaning no juice thus downrank vs pages with higher authority.

Just a guess, hope it helps!

[McTaggart]

Hi Yiannis - yes, I suspect the footer links pointing to external sites were the issue here - the footer links had been in place for a number of years, apparently. This was definitely a penalty - the traffic fell off a cliff, and then climbed a cliff on removal.

Some agencies I work with tell me internal footers are not a problem but then the very same SEO people said the same about their optimized title tags in the not too distant past. Keyword targetted footer tags, put there for Googlebot rather than humans, are a no no in my book.

[McTaggart]

Site appears to have been hit like other sites mentioned here (the site I refer to above is a travel site): http://moz.com/blog/smarter-internal-linking-whiteboard-friday

[artdivision]

Hey Luke,

I checked a couple of sites that rank on page one and have footers everything seems sound towards my end. Can you give me the link of the site so I can have a quick look on the link profile and the footers? Will be more than happy to.

Regards

[McTaggart]

It's all been corrected now. In link above, it gives you an exact example of how travel sites have been typically using footer links, and how they have been hit. I'd say my client was a carbon copy. A travel site with keyword rich footers - a few of which pointed externally - most of which pointed at internal pages.