Interlinking possibly hurting me?

Hi guys I'm usually learning a lot here and it's starting to pay off. In recent times my earnings have gone from $4/m to $50/m to ~$300/mo(knock knock month aint over yet) I hope some day I'll get this thing down and be able to be helpful. Just so you know your words aren't wasted.

For now I'm just asking stupid questions

I had a web 2.0 page about "strawberry ice" ranked on the 1st page of Google.

Then I created do-follow links between my other 8 pages on the same domain and this page, those pages were on "lemon ice" "banana ice" etc.. (before I did this there were already links in place that google doesn't crawl.)

they were hidden with the lazy load javascript that is discussed here (which I think is white hat?)
http://www.seomofo.com/ethics/using-javascript-to-hide-links.html

Then I fell of the 1st page. I think because I created the do-follow links between the 8 pages (they are just linking back and forth basically)

Is it possible creating the do-follow two way links caused this? Or did Google with a delay notice my javascript and perhaps thinks I'm hiding affiliate links?

dont use code to hide links. Its not 1997 anymore.

did you read the article in the link? It's meant to increase good user experience!

it was not the interlinking

no, I dont feel like reading a article from 2010. Its irrelevant to todays SEO

Ok I removed the lazy load script and put the regular links back.

Interlinking can hurt your SEO, but it usually requires an awful lot of links.

I've worked with clients that have had links to their other websites in different countries placed in their footer. They were followed links and, initially, they were alright. As all the sites gradually got bigger and bigger, however, and more and more followed footer links appeared, it definitely hurt the site.

It got hit with an algorithmic penalty (probably triggered by something else), but what sealed the reconsideration request, after many failed attempts, was making those links no-follow.

Not sure this theory would apply to your web 2.0 page, as the scale doesn't seem to be that large. However, worth considering for any SEO.

Thanks Smeems, I'm not close to that scale. I was thinking maybe I either decreased my pagerank in a severe way or they are frowning upon the lazy load script. Otherwise perhaps it's possible I lost my recent page advantage or something. I jumped from 1st page to 3rd :S