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Thanks for the responses everyone! I will look away and stay focused on helping my clients.

In doing competitive research, I've found a lot of competitors to my clients that take part in link exchanges. When using open site explorer, I'm see a ton of competitors that get links from blogs that are supposed to be niche blogs (like blogs about lotions, shoes etc...), but the articles are about random things like "best family dentistry" with keyword matching links in the content. When I find these link exchanges (I call them link exchanges, because it looks like these fake niche blogs are juicing a handful of the same websites), is there any appropriate steps to take, or should I just ignore them, and move on?

Our rankings are starting to take a slight dip and yes, I was thinking about removing all of the links, except the homepage links and I would turn those homepage links back into dofollow links that point to our site.

Thanks for the quick responses!

A few months ago, we changed the anchors in all of our websites footers to rel="nofollow". We did this so we could drop the possibility of getting hit by the penguin update. So first, we had anchors in the template of every website that read something along the lines of "web design by bluetone media". This was on every page, so we quickly changed every link in our footers to nofollows so it would show Google that we were using that space for mainly branding purposes, instead of stealing juice from clients. However, after monitoring our link analysis, we have severely dropped in domain authority, domain moztrust, domain mozrank and more. I believe this is due to the lack of followed links, so would it be best to go back and remove all of the links from the templates of our websites and just leave the dofollow links on the homepages of our websites, or just wait it out and see what happens. This crazy decline in domain authority has only recently happened, should I expect a bounce back soon?

Thanks for the great responses!

For now, I am going to do a rel="nofollow" for all of our clients and slowly over time, change the links,wording and dofollow of the text.

I work at a web development firm and we put site wide links in each of our clients footers (I know this is awful and I am in the process of changing this) that read "web design by, web development by, hosting by,,,etc". My question is, I am in the process of deleting the site wide links and just leaving the links on the home page, but 1. should I get rid of the links all together, that are on sites that have a pr:2 or lower? 2. should I change the footer links, so they aren't all the same text?

In doing competitive research, I've found a lot of competitors to my clients that take part in link exchanges. When using open site explorer, I'm see a ton of competitors that get links from blogs that are supposed to be niche blogs (like blogs about lotions, shoes etc...), but the articles are about random things like "best family dentistry" with keyword matching links in the content. When I find these link exchanges (I call them link exchanges, because it looks like these fake niche blogs are juicing a handful of the same websites), is there any appropriate steps to take, or should I just ignore them, and move on?