I built a site about a subject I loved in early 2006, roughly 300 pages in size, and I used a popular wordpress plugin to interlink similar pages together. The site was fairly popular given it's limited scope and managed to get a decent amount of backlinks naturally.
In late 2009 I reluctantly sold the site to a buyer who offered the right price. They wanted the pagerank and pageviews and were willing to overpay. They promptly redesigned the site and deleted the plugin which handled the interlinking of pages. Home page PR was 4 and most internal pages were PR1-3, not spectacular but solid for a small-ish site with a limited scope.
I was sure I'd see traffic and/or pagerank fall for the internal pages with the related links gone but that never happened, all of the content still carries the same PR and the total traffic has not diminished. In fact traffic never missed a beat during the transfer and re-design, it didn't raise or fall.
a) was Google ignoring the related page links?
b) was the removal of the links enough to offset their loss for other pages?
c) are pages forever remembered as having linked to a page even after the links are gone?
d) Once you link to a page your page is forever tied to it? (doesn't seem plausible but...)
It's been a year now and nothing has happened, at all.
