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Usually if you have a link on your page it will have anchor text, to place a link to another site behind an inage/ico COULD be seen as a neg signal. It may not be your intention, but google cares not about your intentions, it does what it wants. You can always use the nofollow tag if you want to keep the link and are worried it may be effecting your site.

You need to watch the White Board Fridays. http://www.seomoz.org/blog/6-changes-every-seo-should-make-before-the-over-optimization-penalty-hits-whiteboard-friday 4:30 Footer Links 8:50 Webpage Spam. In this case, you are doing microsites selling the same thing: TEMPLATES.