How fast to change keyword rich anchor text

[BobGW]

Hello,

A client of mine has a site with almost all keyword rich anchor text, The problem is on on a bunch of little blogs and some (mostly sitewide) paid links.

We are working to move into 100% white hat SEO, but we're doing it slowly.

My question is, how fast can we change the anchor text on all of these links? I'm worried that if I do it too fast that it will be a red flag.

Thanks.

[Chris.Menke]

If they're all followed links with exact match anchor text and you're thinking about making changes to them, I'd just start nofollowing the vast majority of them--maybe even all of them.  Google already knows they're their and already knows they're spam and knows to discount them and now you want to go back and change them?  I'd say no--as in nofollow.  Then spend the client's money building higher quality links and citations.

[BobGW]

Hi Chris,

Could you look at something. Takeshi Young, who has gave me some really good advice, told me a couple of days ago:

"In regards to paid links, Google has a very hard time detecting these unless you are being blatant about them, and you will typically receive a notice in GWT if you receive a penalty for it. Check to see if there are any manual penalties on your site in GWT. If not, chances are Google has not discovered that the links are paid (yet).

Just trying to settle the confusion. I need to be very careful, as we took off a bunch of links before and rankings tanked.

I need to go the conservative route, but I don't know what that is. You've always gave good advice Chris, thanks for being in on this one.

[Chris.Menke]

I don't think of the kind of links you mentioned in your question as "paid links".  I think of paid links (of the variety Takeshi describes) as those that you pay for on a monthly basis and I think Takeshi is correct in that if the publisher isn't blatant they can be hard to detect--but not always. Those are the easiest kind to get rid of--you just stop paying for them.  The kind of links you mentioned I think of as just run of the mill spam links--either they were free or they had a one time fee or someone was paid to add them to a network of some kind.

[BobGW]

I see, I'll be more specific.

The client put up 40 blogs with no backlinks to the blogs and keyword rich anchor text.

The client paid a monthly fee to 8 or so websites for sitewide image ads.

We took off half the blogs and half of the sitewides and non-repeat traffic dropped by about 70%.

Now I am very shy about nofollowing or deleting anything, and I just want to know conservatively how fast do I change the remaining blog/paid link anchor text?

I'm link building with good content and eventually all this stuff will go away.

Thanks for getting back to me, Chris.

[Chris.Menke]

I'd say the blogs probably aren't doing anything for you algorithmically and I'm guessing they're not what was sending you the non-repeat traffic.  If you're paying for sitewides that are not nofollowed, you should think seriously about stopping that.  Pay for links on other sites as much as you like but make sure they're nofollowed.