Site-wide Links

[AAttias]

Hey y'all,

I know this question has been asked many times before but I wanted to see what your stance was on this particular case.

The organisation I work for is a group of 12 companies - each with its own website. On some of the sites we have a link to the other sites within the group on every single page of that site.

Our organic search traffic has dropped a bit but not significantly and we haven't received any manual penalties from Google.

It's also worth mentioning that the referral traffic for these sites from the other sites I control is quite good and the bounce rate is extremely low.

If you were in my shoes would you remove the links, put a nofollow tag on the links or leave the links as they are?

Thanks guys

[Andy-Halliday]

Hi

If your users are clicking on the links then yes keep them, but make them no follow, however if they are not driving traffic to your other sites and don't add any real value I would recommend removing them.

However this article is very similar to a question that was asked last year and instead of duplicating everything that was said here I thought I would just post so that you can read the comments http://moz.com/community/q/are-sitewide-links-bad-for-seo (we know Google doesn't like duplicate content)