Site Wide Footer Links Exception, Any Advice ?

[Antony_Towle]

I was reading the following Q&A on site wide footer links,

http://moz.com/community/q/site-wide-links-from-another-domain-could-these-cause-a-problem

I feel my situation is slightly different however,we have lots of international sites linking to each other through these links like our sites for different counties and languages so our German, French and Spanish sites,

http://www.cirrusresearch.co.uk/

Our main UK site has always ranked very well and has never really had a problem despite always having had these followed sitewide footer links, Because of this we regularly get high amount of visitors performing English language searches from different counties and i don't think it is a bad thing having more country/language specific sites of ours available in the footer for visitors that may prefer a more localized site,

Our main website has to be at least 10+ years old at least, has a lot of strong links compared to our competitors, but the smaller German and Spanish sites are relatively smaller in size and most only 1-2 years old, my big fear is that these smaller sites would not be able to stand on there own without these footer links from our main site,

After reading the community question caused me to question this ?, should i take a leap of faith and no-follow all of these site wide footer links connecting all of our sites ? we never really had a problem ranking so i don't really see the need but would this be the best thing to do ?

Thank you,

James

[Antony_Towle]

Thanks,

As long as we seem to rank well i don't really see it as a problem, i do track visitors using these links also,

Thank you your answer has reassured me,

James

[Alex-Harford]

I would keep them followed - they are your websites, and genuine links so why not? Lots of websites do this naturally without a problem.

If any of the sites are duplicates where the only differences are regional you should make sure everything is set up to Google's liking. http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.co.uk/2013/09/video-expanding-your-site-to-more.html

You could remove any keywords from the anchor text if you're worried e.g. instead of
Noiselevelmeter.com | Sound Level Meters for the US & Canada just keep the URL as the link:
Noiselevelmeter.com - Sound Level Meters for the US & Canada

Or alternatively link to the other websites from your homepage only.