Are internal and external footers on all pages of a large website detrimental to seo?

[Pday]

Hi, I am doing an seo clean up of our site - we have about 12 footers on the bottom of each page plus an internal site map including core keywords.  Most footers go to internal sites and some go to external sites which are replicated on those external sites linking back to ours. (these sites are part of the same large company but are not related in any way)  Are these bad from an seo ranking perspective? Do the look like spam? We get considerable traffic from one of the external footers that is replicated on their site so need to weigh up what the best option is whether to keep the traffic or to loose it as part of the seo clean up.

thanks

[CleverPhD]

Read out loud what you just wrote "12 footers on the bottom of each page" and "these sites are part of the same large company but are not related in any way".  I am frankly surprised you get traffic from this as if I see 12 footers and many of those are non related to the present site that would not be useful to me as a user.

Forget traffic referrals.  Does that traffic convert?  Figure out if is does, the "considerable traffic" may not convert at all and so while you have less traffic, it does not impact your bottom line.  You may also find a middle way from just deleting everything etc.

Generally site wide links are not useful or can be ignored so you are really not doing yourself any favors.  It may be that if you update, you rank better in Google and get traffic that way.