Gaining a lot of "questionable links" fast might incurr penalties.

...is there a benefit to losing a lot of "questionable links" fast?

[sandpetra]

The reason I ask is that i have 6 (near but never 100%) :) sitewide links from another of my sites to my site which are (on topic) but questionable in the sense that if SEs didnt exist I wouldnt have them at all or at least they would have different anchor text.

The six links meant that the pages they were pointing to ranked well in SEs for the targetted keywords. Now, with proper social marketing, I have managed to get other pages on the site to rank for these terms.

What's the chances that having these links are dampening my site(s) in serps now to some extent and removing them will improve the site even further?

[MLHmptn]

I would say your really committing "Cross-Link" suicide, especially if your sites are all on the same class-c subnet. I would refrain from doing cross-linking site-wides on your sites immediately. Maybe a link here, a link there but nothing excessive like site-wide. Whenever I link to my sites it's a simple one-page link(nothing site-wide, nor excessive) and only if it's on-topic and once the sites starts to get indexed I immediately remove the links from my own sites to each other. Sure it might not be needed to remove the link to each of my sites ever but I honestly don't want to give Google a reason to penalize any of my sites for linking to each other given that I own them all and Google is a registrar now. Google seems to come up with anything anymore to penalize our sites. Had Google not had the market share I would be focusing my efforts elsewhere and say the!@#$ with Google! :>~ But Google is king and until the king is removed from the throne we are all forced to comply to the best of our abilities.

[edited by: MLHmptn at 6:04 am (utc) on April 13, 2007]