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My ecommerce website has menus which contain 'featured product sub-categories'.  These are shown alongside the other product sub-category links.  Each 'featured product category' includes a link, an image (with link) and some text.

All menu content is visible to search engines.

These menus look nice and probably encourage CTR (not tested!) but are they bad for SEO?

Thanks Greg, I've just been mulling everything over before responding and posting further.

Your last post gives me a glimmer of hope. Congratulations on recovering the site, you must have been seriously pleased that it paid off.  I must admit, though, that everything else that I have read on Moz and elsewhere suggests that I should do the whole emailing (probably several rounds), documenting and then disavow thing.  Do you have any links that you can possibly share, please?  Just want to ensure that I'm doing the right thing, before embarking on it.

As a general update, since my last post, I have:

• Scrutinised traffic trends in Google Analytics against Penguin/Panda update dates. There really aren't any sudden drops that I can pinpoint, but more continual erosion over time.  Like your situation, I have also seen rankings plummet for certain keywords only.   Due to over use on exact match in anchor text, undoubtedly. But, these keywords didn't necessarily yield high search volume, so hard to see trends with these too.

• **Ran a Link Detox report. ** This shows -

  • 78 toxic links (6.6%)
  • 759 suspicious links (64%)
  • 347 healthy links (29.3%)

• Had a quote for link removal from a different SEO - unsure whether to outsource this or do it myself.  The quote seems reasonable (and a lot cheaper than the original SEO's quote).

• Arranged a telephone call with an industry PR company, who can maybe assist with gaining earned links.

So, moving forward, I'll look to get a quote for a site audit.  (Thanks for your links, I'm UK based though so probably would be best to use someone in the same country).

Any other options to consider?  Should I do the link removal myself (using Link Detox and rmoov) or outsource it to someone who's done it before (not sure how successfully though)?

Thanks for the reply.

Yes, the same link is displayed three times in the navigation menu (so two repeats)!  There are 3 of these featured menu items in total.

I thought the official line from Google was no to nofollows for internal links?  Has this changed?

Sorry if I've not been very clear. I'm not particularly concerned about industry blog links, it was more that I was just trying to convey link volume. (But not very well, admittedly).

No unnatural links warning in Google WMT.

Nor was there a sudden plummet of traffic either, as far as I can tell.

Thanks both.