Nothing can physically remove them but the webmasters that own those websites, so:

1. You need to craft a well organized pitch email that doesn't offend the webmaster, and asks them politely to remove the link. Bank on this taking at least 3 total emails, and in many cases, you might get no response.

PM me and I can send you a script or two that has been effective for us.

2. No too can remove those links for you externally.

Hope this helps!

Strengthening the home page with inbound branded links, and mixed commercialized / brand links from editorial / high quality sources builds authority, which as Perfect007 mentioned, distributes 'weight' throughout the website.

This improved domain authority tends to move relevant associated topics within the website up in rankings more than non-related areas. For example, the more tightly knit the homepage is to the categories that comprise it, the more inbound link building to the homepage impacts those pages.

At the same time, link building to strategic inner pages moves the needle as well, and reinforces authority to associated related sub categories and 'sister' categories in the website.

As a basic rule of thumb, competition being equal - the further apart your inner categories are insofar as relations, the more authority you need to build at the base level (root, homepage) in order to move inner categories forward.

Hope this helps.

In my experience you will generate more consistent inbound links to the root url - http://www.consumerbase.com/index.html - if you were to use that as the root (canonical) url and do the following

1. Ask anyone linking to /index.html to link to http://www.consumerbase.com/
2. Once completed, 301 redirect /index.html to http://www.consumerbase.com/

Ask yourself this: how often do you see someone refer an audience to http://www.consumerbase.com/index.html?

There rarely, do - out of convenience and ease of use / standardization.

So, for sharing and for ensuring that all inbound link weight is organized at only one canonical url I would suggest you consider using http://www.consumerbase.com/ at the root.

All other pages can use use .html just fine.

Hope this helps,
Todd

Hi Carla,

FWIW Google Feedburner will probably be discontinued now that Google Reader has.

I personally don't think there is much value to the link given either.

Hope this helps!
Todd