Will Google penalise me for having multiple links on the same page to the same external website? A quick answer for this is appreciated because the company in question (who requested I do this) are losing sales fast.

how many times are we talking here? i think there should be a good balance between the external link and the amount of content on the page. i think it would have to be a pretty high number of links to make a real negative effect. were the links added and then the hits decreased. perhaps they inadvertenly have linked to a bad neighborhood.

The amount of times changes from page to page, roughly in the range of 10 each page. We are not to sure if this is what made the hits drop but after the site was posted (1st Jan) the sales plummeted. The link in question takes you to an E-Shop and the link was supplied by the E-Shop creators, it does go to the right place. It is really just a question of does it mean we will be penalised for all these links? (The E-shop content cannot be indexed by Google anyway)

how new is the site? you say posted jan 1st? is this a brand new site? how could they see the sales drop if its only existed for a month and a half. is it the eshop new for them? perhaps there is something wrong with the eshop software. maybe people are turned off by the appearance of the eshop, and dont trust buying from it. there could be a few different reasons. without really seeing the pages im just speculating here tho. honestly i dont think 10 would be enough to get you penalized.

The site has been around for 4 years, it was an updated version that was submitted in 1st Jan. The E-shop is hosted by a seperate provider (1&1) and has been in use for 2 years. Since adding the updated site (with the extra links leading to sections in the E-Shop) the sales have dropped, we have contacted the providers who have analyzed the shop and found no problem so the problem must lay within the information site that we provide to lead them to the shop (at least that is what we think). The links are clean but it may just be that we have over done it with the linking but we are not sure, people are certainly not put off by the shop as before we had this problem we were making anywhere from 20-40 sales a day

As a tempory precaution we uploaded the old version of the site (with only one link leading to the shop) and the sales started to climb slowly but not as much as they were before

since i dont know what the product is im just going to assume its not something seasonal which would explain the decline in sales. did they change the product line? i just can't imagine seeing a huge decrease in product sales like that purely based off of changing some links. if you've eliminated all other obvious possibilities then i would start wondering about the links. thats about all i can think of for now. hopefully someone else will chime in with some advice.