Will cleaning up old pr articles help serps?

[devoted2vintage]

For a few years we published articles with anchor text backlinks to about 10 different article submission sites. Each article was modified to create similar different articles. We have about 50 completely unique articles. This worked really well for our serps until google panda & penguin updates. I am looking for advice on whether I should have a major clean up of the published articles and if so should I be deleting them, removing or renaming anchor text backlinks? Any advice on what strategy would work best would be appreciated as I don't want to start deleting backlinks and making it worse. We used to enjoy position 1 but are now at 12-15 so have least most of our traffic.

[KrisRoadruck]

Article directories have been looked down on by google for quite some time now (basically since panda, long before penguin). Couple that with them coming down on overly aggressive money anchor linking and the issue you have with semi-duped content there (Im guessing you spun them so you could take the same article and shop it to all 10 directories each time you did this) and yeah thats a bad recipe. I'd definitely delete the articles if you still have access to all the accounts. 50 unique * 10 directories Im guessing 500 crap links in total? Ditch em and then work on getting some really awesome replacements (you wont need nearly as many). High quality guest blogging is the new article submission. See if you can't get some guest author accounts at a few tightly related sites from your industry or aim high and see about getting guest author accounts on general purpose but super authoritative sites (few examples that allow this, national geographic, cracked.com, washington times, guardian.co.uk, investopedia, you get the idea here...) dumping those old links and adding in just even 20-30 great ones is going to be a huge lift for you.

[devoted2vintage]

Thanks for the great advice. Should I dump them all or leave a single master copy of each article online? Thanks

[KrisRoadruck]

Nah. Ditch em. Article directory links are pretty garbage these days. Any miniscule benefit they may still provide isnt worth the headache of wondering if those are the links keeping ya down. Also if you ever have to do a reconsideration request it'll be one less thing for you to clean up because under a manual review there isnt  google engineer out there who isnt going to frown on them links.