I  put an end to that, mostly because it was absolutely pointless and not user friendly.

This..

In terms of a neutral link profile, it needs to, above everything else, appear natural. If your link profile consisted of nothing but dofollow links, then this could be considered unnatural.

There is no limit to the number of links that denote something odd, per se, but you must step back and look at it from Google's eyes. Would they want to see 400 article links all coming from submissions at the same site? Would this suggest article spam? Are these articles each going to be high quality?

It is much more natural to have a few links from a site, but if someone is genuinely seeding all of your content, then I would expect this to be, at worst case, a neutral signal to Google. They will know how good the articles are, how often they are shared, who is posting them, etc.

Also, keep your anchor text neutral / clean. Don't over-optimise it as this will undoubtedly bring problems with it.

I don't really like plugging my own site, but have a read of this: http://bit.ly/1LyeiAh. You may get some additional info there.

-Andy

I might have said there would be no harm normally, but after a client came to me to find out why a .co.uk was appearing above the .com, which was his main site, I would say it can do harm. The .co.uk was simply being pointed to the .com. First time I have seen this happen so just tread carefully. Either way, it's a too grey hat for my liking - to try and get more search traffic by trying to mis-lead people from one domain to another is a no-no. Just tell them that with all of the algo changes going on, they are best scratching that idea and focusing their efforts on great content. If that got found out (and it can very easily if someone reports it) then all domains will be penalised.

Hi Michael,

The first thing I would say, is that the page is somewhat lacking in actual content. There are only 168 words on there and this to me would suggest a thin page in Google's eyes.

You then have to ask yourself, who am I trying to attract to the page and what do I offer them when they get there? Do I answer a question in enough detail that Google is going to rank me well for it?

Is the page about Mountaineering or Edmund Hilary? What is the purpose of the page? What phrase are are you trying to optimize for?

I hope this makes sense?

-Andy

Hi,

Is there a reason they are there? Do they serve any purpose at all?

I would be surprised if Google did anything with them and would probably just see it as a bit of spurious code. Are you able to share an example?

-Andy

It looks like it's been done to activate certain functions, but it might have been a bit of a lazy way to do it.

However, because of the fact that they are a null link but they might show a description or more information, I can't see that this would ever cause issues to SEO.

Have you noticed that there has been any drop in positions that make you feel like they could be causing problems?

-Andy