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I actually think you might be thinking about it too much. Are the articles written by your company about your company like guest posts? If they are and you are asked to link back by the site that posted the guest post, that is a bad link. Those will be detected. Are they real articles written about the company? If so you should promote these in many ways. Why is your company linking to the articles? If it's so that they can point people to what's being said about them, you don't need to remove those links. They are there for a good reason. If you're doing the linking for your customers and potential customers, you're fine. If you're doing it for SEO purposes or to make someone happy so they will link to you, don't do it.

For local results they can be worth the effort.  However, in my opinion, you would be better off investing the time and money into content or usability testing.

Thanks!!

"4 letter words are appropriate at certain times, in certain situations..... Much like directories....." LOL. Love it!

Thanks Brett for the reply. I just got the point.

There are literally hundreds of alternatives. All do require effort though, nothing in SEO should be easy. Add me on Skype and I'd be happy to guide you through a few ideas

If the website is great then there is no problem! You get 2 backlinks from CNN, now if you have a choice to get one more... will you reject it? Other than the fact that link helps in getting better rankings... links also drive referral traffic to your website which can also convert in to leads and sales....so if the website is good and can drive traffic... then I would say go for it!

It's not true that you will "never recover," no. I've seen sites go from being manually penalized to being the most heavily organic trafficked site in their respective industries. You probably lost credit for some links that were helping in the past, and there are possibly still some bad links dragging you down algorithmically. The best solution is just to continue generating awareness and build up your trust with Google. You can absolutely recover completely and reach new heights.

Thanks again Jerry. Would focus more on quality articles in blog from now on

As pointed out it depends, on a variety of factors.   It can take hrs or either months for Google to crawl something.  One thing that we always suggest is that you can use social signals, in particular Google+, on the page that has the link to get it crawled faster. For example if you are a gun company, and you want the link that you got on NY Times to be crawled faster tweet out the NY Times article. In the end you want that page that has your linked to get crawled faster.  Here are a few tips that we wrote about a few months ago, that might help you: http://www.theedesign.com/blog/2013/raleigh-internet-marketers-index-your-website-for-you

I'm sure people on this forum can come up with plenty of theories, but the easiest way to get a definitive answer is to test it. Remove the anchor text for a few weeks, and see if rankings change, then add it back in again and see if there is an impact. My guess is that a small change like this won't move the needle either way, but if you want to obsess over the small details test it and see what happens. For bonus points, add Google Analytics tracking code and see if anyone even clicks on the link. If the users aren't clicking on it, then it makes sense to go ahead and remove it.

thanks a lot Sorina.

thanks for the help, was helpful.

1st your goal is most likely to generate sales or leads for you or your client.  If that is the case what does it matter where the lead came from.  What matters is finding where your potential customers are and reaching them. Bing's market share is at 16.3% vs Google 67%.  So Bing has 1 out of every 6 search customers. So by ignoring Bing you are ignoring potential customers. But when you pay attention to the backlinks from Bing you are diversifying your linking strategy.  They saying goes "you should not put all of your eggs in one basket."

Things that will make these links look more suspicious include exact match anchor text, highly unrelated links (eg poker, viagra, attorney links on a gardening website), lots of low-quality websites that have other spammy indicators being linked to. If it's a bunch of websites that have generally high quality metrics, using branded anchor text for the links, then you're probably fine. That will just look like a normal blogroll.

Fairly large BL profile since '07 so there's always some I don't recognize but the "recent links" in GWT will help me monitor this now. Thanks so much, if they keep coming from new domains I'll definitely have to get more serious finding the cause.

If you're a global site yes, if local then they probably don't hold as much weight but still count. If you have a french section of your site and have links from .fr domains that's a good indicating factor as one of many factors.

Everett, That is a great answer and specifically what I am looking for.  The main reason I asked that question is because I working on a niche type site they are where there are 5-8 long tail keywords which people search for the product I am working with. I was thinking of creating a 2-3 long tail keyword and have specific page focused with that specific long-tail keyword exactly like they have done. Again - thank you for the feedback and great help!!!! Denny

Okay, something's got lost in translation, so if you can tell me whether I've understood your situation correctly that would help 1. You had an old URL domain.com/blogpost-1 2. You had other posts pointing at domain.com/blogpost-1 3. You changed the permalink to domain.com/new-blog-post 4. You also redirected domain.com/blogpost-1 to domain.com/new-blog-post however on your site you have pages that point to domain.com/blogpost-1 yes? What I am saying is that any pages that still reference the old blog post should be corrected to point to the new blog post. Any clearer?:-)