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On my blog posts, I have links to all the categories and months, dating back 5-6 years. This make the number of links on each blog page well over 100, which I understand might decrease the value of each page. Is there a problem with having more than 100 links on a page?

Dan,  thank you for your post om WP SEO.   It is the most informative piece of writing I have found on the subject.   I'm going to dig into my sites this weekend to make sure I have set up my blogs per your instructions.

We were penalized for back links our SEO firm acquired for us long before the Penguin update.  As I found out, link removal can be a slow, painful process.  After months of trying to do it ourselves, we hired Virante, a company that is SEOMoz-recommended.  They are fast and efficient and it was well worth the money.

Only one of the directories they contacted wanted to be paid $10 per removed link.  It's no wonder they were one of the spammiest site contacted.

Rand, I appreciate your feedback.  We have been doing this for 9 years, thought we were doing a fairly decent job of building a brand (until we took a hit) and plan to continue for the long term, so I think your advice on building the new site(s) is a good one.

Once Google responds (or doesn't) to our latest request, we'll make that decision.  By the way, we have been using an SEOMoz-referred company to help us with link-removal and, despite Google's refusal to budge after a huge number of links have been removed, I think they're doing a very good job.  I know what they're up against, so I'm hoping to be able to give them rave reviews once this is done.