Displaying archive content articles in a writers bio page

[EricPacifico]

My site has writers, and each has their own profile page (accessible when you click their name inside an article). We set up the code in a way that the bios, in addition to the actual writer photo/bio, would dynamically generate links to each article he/she produces. Figured that someone reading something by Bob Smith, might want to read other stuff by him.

Which was fine, initially.

Fast forward, and some of these writers have 3,4, even 15 pages of archives, as the archive system paginates every 10 articles (so www.example.com/bob-smith/archive-page3, etc)

My thinking is that this is a bad thing. The articles are likely already found elsewhere in the site (under the content landing page it was written for, for example) and I visualize spiders getting sucked into these archive black holes, never to return.

I also assume that it is just more internal mass linking (yech) and probably doesnt help the overall TOS/bounce/exit, etc.

Thoughts?

[RyanKent]

Your idea of offering links to other content written by the same author is quite sound. The question is how to best implement that idea.

You specifically ask about writers who have an extensive content history. You could use a system simliar to what Matt Cutts uses on his blog. If your writer has a similar history to Matt, I would prefer having the 2005 - 2009 entries grouped by year rather then by month. This change would consolidate 50+ links down to 5.