Welcome to the Q&A Forum

I dont see any reason to put or not the follow links in your navigation, unless you want to focus on a certain page for more relevancy, or focusing a certain page for ranking. If you want to remove your follow links on your navigation be sure you specified your inner pages in your Sitemap.xml, so Google bots can still track your pages.

The links on our link exchange script accounted to about 2% of websites total links, most of our link building has been through natural articles and websites posting about us. So even if Google discounted our links via link exchange - this wouldn't of made us drop this much? I agree with you.  That's a very small number and unlikely to be the problem. The duplicate content issue is fixed. Excellent! I have removed the link exchange script. Good.... Even if I link as www.freemoviedb.com as anchor text, will it still help me rank for my keywords? Yes, you'll want to keep a number of links out there with your keyword anchor text, as that still has a high effect on ranking for a particular term.  But you'll want to present a link profile that has a more natural "mix" of keywords and your domain to avoid getting flagged as spammy.

We use yext and love it. Yuou can submit and synergies all NAP listings in one spot.

Thnak you all for your insights. I've learned a lot!

This is the exact reason why I am hesitant to purchase and run with .CO domains. I would rather exercise all of my options to make a .com work rather than running with a .CO.