Do links from between common sites you run count as "bad" links?

[AMA-DataSet]

Hi everyone,
Iv recently been asked to review a group of sites.

There are 3 sites, each of these sites has a link to the other two sites within the footer or the navigation.
These site are about a similar topic each provides a different perceptive or aims at a specific section of the industry so its not like the links are to irreverent sites.

However because the links are in a global section they are repeated thousands of times on each site and count for a large proportion of the link profile to each site, I don't think this is good practise and I want to remove them or at least add a no-follow but my client insists they are relevant to each other and doesn't not want the links removing.

What would be best in this situation? remove them? no-follow them? or leave them?

Thank you in advance,
Liam

[Chris.Menke]

Liam,

There's no problem with the links as long at they're nofollowed. You can let the client know that sitewide followed footer links from a network of sites when out of practice as an SEO techique back in the dark ages. As long as the client doesn't think of them as helping the algorithmic results of the other sites and only thinks of them as a way to send referral traffic to the other sites, they'll be in good shape.