Removing whitespaces from link text - is it safe?

[SEOPTI]

I own a site where there are thousands of internal links with whitespaces at the end and at the beginning or middle part of the link text.

" link text " or "link text"

The whole site has been indexed and performs very well.
I could remove these whitespaces with trim and preg_replace but I'm wondering what Google thinks about removing whitespaces from thousands of internal links?

Need to test this one ..

[tedster]

Such small changes, each on its own, should not be an issue at all. And in the past, I would probably have just gone ahead with a clean-up project like this without a second thought.

But given some of the apparent link-change flags that are being thrown these days, I can conceive that even this minimal change done to significant numbers of links at one time just might kick a traffic problem into being, at least for a short term.

Yes, I'd test it on a small scale first. Then, even if the results are good, I'd probably still make the changes in stages - more links at once but not all of them.

[SEOPTI]

Thanks tedster, I'll give it a try.