Links into website that are unnatural - a paid article

[GardenBeet]

I prepared an article for another related website and posted it on my website -

http://www.gardenbeet.com/garden_design_blog/garden-ideas/save-money-and-create-diversity-seeds-and-small-plants-are-better/

I was paid to write an article and provided a link to the related website at the end of the article - I declared the payment

a good 10 months later the page where the article sits has become the 2nd most linked to page on my website -  SEOmoz is giving it a Page Authority of 48 and all the links are coming from a wide variety of forums using one anchor text link phrase

in the latest google update my homepage PR dropped by 1 - I am assuming the penalty came because of this article

is it worth changing the URL to remove these spammy links to my website?

[zigojacko]

At some point, someone has hired one of these worthless 'link building' packages online that pays for however many forum profile backlinks. Whilst many of them have been deployed incorrectly (thankfully for you) - You can tell this by the fact BBCode was used on the forums when some of the forums in questions don't accept this and use an HTML editor instead.

This kind of artificially generated link profiling was targeted in the Google Penguin algorithm updates, this could largely prove the outcome of any recent deterioration in your domain's performance as it is blindingly obvious most of the backlinks are from link spam.

Perhaps the company you wrote the article for, once published, then buy useless packages online to build lots of links to their content which then links to their own website...?

If it were me, I would take down the article and request a URL removal from the index in Google Webmaster Tools. It may even be worthwhile creating a 301 redirect to point to somewhere else so that lots of 404 errors aren't triggered on your site (if there is any worthwhile traffic coming via any of the links pointing to the article).

You can view the link profile for this URL here.