Same Header and Footer on A network of sites!

We all know Google penalizes Link farms and strongly discourage network linking. One of my client?s website is authoritative with home page PR 6 and it is an authority news site. Though, they?ve several other properties hosted on separate domains and they share the same header footer on all those properties. Even links within headers and footers land back to the parent site whereas they should link to network sites pages. It is more or less like this:

Abc.com (parent site)
Edf.com (copies header footer of abc.com)
Ghi.com (copies header footer of abc.com)
Xyz.com (copies header footer of abc.com) and list goes on!

I am getting a strong vibe that it may be considered a link farm or a manipulative practice.

What do you guys suggest in this regard? Is it a good practice or we should change it? Any official word of mouth from Google or any expert in the industry! I would appreciate a positive debate on it.

As long as you are not selling OBL's and are just linking internally you are safe Just as an experiment remove the links and wait for 1-2 weeks and see what happens with your SERPs ...

lmxftw said:

As long as you are not selling OBL's and are just linking internally you are safe Just as an experiment remove the links and wait for 1-2 weeks and see what happens with your SERPs ...

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Makes sense! All those OBL's go back to the abc.com domain. In simple words, the header/footer is the same on all other domains and OBLs land to abc.com.

I may be able to make a test but i need to show some proof of link farming or any harm in having a duplicate header/footer. Can you help?

How exactly the footer has been worded out? Does it say somewhere that its "Part of ABC network" or something like that? If you have that much of a clarity in place then you can at-least arbitrate if later get banned.

i was suggesting this test to see for yourself that your rankings will decrease if you remove those links you might even get a manual review after you remove them as dropping a large quantity of sitewides at the same time will most likely trigger filters

nabeelt said:

Makes sense! All those OBL's go back to the abc.com domain. In simple words, the header/footer is the same on all other domains and OBLs land to abc.com.

I may be able to make a test but i need to show some proof of link farming or any harm in having a duplicate header/footer. Can you help?

Click to expand...