Wordpress blogs and link generation

[jesse-landry]

So I'm working on cleaning up our backlink profile and discovered that a few of our blogs are clogging things up... Google reports that one in particular is responsible for 454 links...
So I ran a quick sitemap to try and get a better understanding where these are coming from and discovered that all of the stupid tags and categories that the former marketing person posted her blogs to were creating new pages and counting new links from the footer found on each. So there were 370 pages counted by the sitemap generator.

This explains why all the links.

Now my questions

1.) how hurtful are all these links?

2.) what's the best way to handle links on company-sponsored blogs.. in sidebar widgets or embedded in the text?

3.) what is the purpose of those categories and tags? My boss seems to think they help in SEO efforts but I am insisting they are worthless and would like to remove them all. He thinks we should keep a couple per post... bleh

Any advice here would be lovely.

Thanks

[MikeRoberts]

Sitewide footer links are bad. I'd go with relevant text links in copy and/or put the important links on the blog's homepage in a sidebar. Categories and tags are a good thing if done correctly. They only help in SEO in the sense that they show a relationship and relevancy between multiple posts. When done well, this can help with user experience, increase visitor time on site, and reduce bounces. Categories and Tags are almost always marked NoIndex because of the duplicate content they create. A couple relevant tags per post is a good thing. One (maybe two) relevant category per post.

[jesse-landry]

i can't seem to figure out how to mark the categories and tags as noindex. any help here? i read the wordpress blog here on seomoz at http://www.seomoz.org/blog/setup-wordpress-for-seo-success but don't have access to plugins folders via the wordpress.com site...?

i'm clearly a wordpress noob and don't really love the platform but one of our blogs in particular is averaging 2500 visitors per month so I can't abandon it now.

[MikeRoberts]

What hosting solution are you using? The free solution offered by Wordpress doesn't give you access to plugins or altering the html.

[jesse-landry]

that's the one and is what I figured.

so I'm outta luck unless we upgrade.