Should I remove links from my internal blog?

[creativeguy]

I have blogs/news sites on every one of my clients' websites (each representing a different business within the same industry - self storage).

On each of these blog sites, I have a writer who places about 3-5 exact keyword match links (varying anchor text) to give interlink juice to the other off-site businesses owned by the client.

Each of these blogs receive about five posts per week.

I am sure this is mega-over-optimizing and a stupid thing to do considering penguin.

So, my questions are:

Moving forward - 1.  Should i stop adding so many blog articles to each site?

2.  How many interlinking anchor texts should I use per blog?

3.  Should I go back and either get rid of all those interlinks on past blogs or just trash the blog articles altogether?

Please help if you can - I very much appreciate the responses

best

bd

[SEODinosaur]

Hi,

It's good to place links where the reads can benefit. It is not good to place links to manipulate the search engine. Having EMA (Exact Match Anchor) multiple times on a blog post clearly looks like an over optimization attempt.

1.  Should i stop adding so many blog articles to each site?

You can add as much content to your blog as you want. However, it must be good/entertaining/educational content.

2.  How many interlinking anchor texts should I use per blog?

There is no real number for that, placing a link to another resource should be done for the user not the spider.

3.  Should I go back and either get rid of all those interlinks on past blogs or just trash the blog articles altogether?

I would remove all the links that do not help the readers or change some of the links so that they do help the reader.

[CMC-SD]

Are these blogs actually intended to provide useful, interesting, amusing content to web surfers? Or do they exist purely to pass pagerank?

If it's the former, I have a hard time believing that readers will trust the information if it looks spammy (and 3-5 exact match KW links per post looks spammy). So the strategy probably wouldn't work for that reason.

If it's the latter, it's trivially easy for Google to figure out that you're running an incestuous little blog network to move pagerank around. That's not the sort of thing they want to reward. Meaning they've already figured out how to devalue those links, or they will soon. So the strategy either isn't working now or will stop working soon.

In either case, your questions are about rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.