xiaochu

We have six or seven financial services sites that do very well for us across their individual keyword categories. We recently added a network footer so that users who like our credit card debt consolidation site, for example, could know that we also offer content and resources on tax debt relief. We added a network footer on every page of our site which linked to the homepage of each of our sites in the middle of February. This morning - we disappeared from 90% of our SERPS. No other changes had been made. It occurred to me that this might look like a huge increase in inbound links to some of our sites, which might cause a red flag - even though we're just trying to cross promote our small network. We immediately removed the footer from our network. Does anyone know if this is most likely the case? Is there any way to cross promote our sites without getting penalized? Will our rankings return once the pages are indexed without the footer? Looking at some of the leaders in the space we thought it would be okay - since they all seem to internetwork their sites - i.e. Lending Tree w/ GetSmart and their other IAC properties. Any insight would be appreciated.