Footer Links with same anchor text on all pages

[janc]

We have different websites targeted at the different services our company provides. (e.g. For our document storage services, we have www.ukdocumentstorage.com. For document management, we have www.document-management-solutions.co.uk).

If we take the storage site for example, every single page has a link in the footer to our document management site, with the anchor text 'Cleardata Document Management'

SEOMoz is telling me that these are seen as external links (as they are on a different URL's), and I'm just clarifying that would this be a major possible factor in the website not ranking highly?

How should I rectify this issue?

[rtmaas]

Hello,

There was recently a good article about this in the SEOMoz blog.

This is the article link: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/lifting-a-manual-penalty-given-by-google-personal-experience

Here is a quote from the article:" When developing websites for clients, we always include links in the bottom right footer of the client's website. Usually, this is something along the lines of "Web Design Yorkshire | Pinpoint Designs". These two blocks of text include links to the homepage of our agency's website. When looking at the webmaster guidelines, it's pretty obvious that we should never have been doing this, and most likely the cause of our penalty."

Hopefully this helps answer your question!

Ryan Maas

[janc]

Thanks for the link Ryan. I'll check out that post now to see how they'd deal with footer links on all pages.

[irvingw]

Make it homepage only.

Sitewide means you might get rankings suppressed for the keyword "Cleardata Document Management"

[janc]

Irving,

Would all of our rankings be down because we have a majority of backlinks having exactly the same anchor text?

Thanks