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On-page links (or internal links) are links pointing from Page A (in this case your homepage) to any other page on your site.

Currently, your homepage is linking to many other pages within your site. But I think this is a normal practice. Take a look at any other popular site and you'll see the same thing (ex. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/). What I would suggest though, is to analyze user behavior and identify what links are being clicked on the most. If some of your links are never clicked on, is it really useful to have them there?

Howard

Hello,

For the first time, I think my site has been the victim of a black hat (spam) attack

I have a blog in a competitive niche and my rankings suddenly dropped (from top 3 to top 20). A quick peek at my latest backlinks using Open Site Explorer "Just Discovered" revealed some nasty looking comment spam links with my target keywords posted recently.

Of course, I haven't hired anyone to post such links and I haven't done it myself.  So my only guess is that a competitor has been generous enough to invest on spamming my site.

Questions:

1. How can I confirm if this is in fact a spam attack?

2. Should I worry about this?

3. If so, what is the best way to go about this?

Would appreciate any thoughts on this.

Thanks in advance!

Howard

Matthew, much appreciated.

Thankfully I don't need to worry about redirects since it's just a transition to a new template. About 90% of the other elements will remain intact.

Checking webmaster tools after the transition sounds really helpful.

ps. Thanks to everyone for your great responses!