My mini network discovered?

I built up a good number of sites (around 80 odd) and many were interlinked with sitewide footer links.

Recently my rankings for the keywords in these sitewides have dropped drastically in the serps

Should i just remove them all and replace them with homepage only links?

Its weird as i see my competition are still doing exactly what i am with worse backlinks.

I didn't want to touch the sitewides as i was doing so well until recently.

They are all in the same general niche.

Did you make sure to host each site on a unique IP?

--> General Note: C-Class doesn't really cut it anymore w/ Google.

Did you spread your network across multiple web hosts?

--> If not, you should have / should in the future if doing something similar.

i wouldn't be linking around in footer links at all, basic footer links will not give the link juice you're looking for and will give away that they're part of a network.

I'd avoid interlinking those blogs whatsoever, you are leaving way too much footprints this way, just use them to buildid quality backlinks to your 2nd group of websites, or split the existing group in parts.

Interlinking your own sites = begging to get owned.

DamageX said:

Interlinking your own sites = begging to get owned.

Click to expand...

Definitely! It's not a good idea to risk with 80 high PR domains for sake of such little benefit that can turn out to be a disaster for your whole network.

the_demon said:

Did you make sure to host each site on a unique IP?

--> General Note: C-Class doesn't really cut it anymore w/ Google.

Did you spread your network across multiple web hosts?

--> If not, you should have / should in the future if doing something similar.

Click to expand...

They're actually all on cloudflare now

I've noticed my competition are all on the same server too.

DamageX said:

Interlinking your own sites = begging to get owned.

Click to expand...

^^^^^^^^^^^^^

This

"Hey Google - come and take a look at this self promotion I've been doing"

Scritty said:

^^^^^^^^^^^^^

This

"Hey Google - come and take a look at this self promotion I've been doing"

Click to expand...

Links on the same IP - or even very close ones numerically (B C or D class) are not worth much..if anything at all.

Get yourself some cheap hosting $2.99 a month for a year (if you pay up front - most are a lot more expensive if you pay month by month)
Though I would add privacy (Google has no rights to breach privacy despitre what some people may tell you)
Host 20 sites all on different IP's for $750-$1000 a year including names and privacy?

If you could add 10-20 pieces of decent content per month to each site - after a year you'd have a license to print money if you picked a decent niche and didn't mess up the background SEO for them by being too hasty.

Scritty