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This is what I'm thinking too, FWIW.  Of course, it's hard to remove links from real spammy pages since they are mostly auto-generated

Have you done this yourself and are talking from direct experience or is this just a "feeling"?  Not bashing you, just curious because some answers like this are too easy to write what everyone assumes rather than real experiences. I'm very interested in this question too - I have a similar situation.

Thanks Barry. Yes, I've got a lot of links this way but as you say, of varying worth. I have been switching my efforts to guest blogging recently anyway, so I still need fresh content - but with over a 1000 articles I could probably get away with just rewriting from that pool.

Actually I havent seen any hit to my EZA traffic and in fact traffic to my site increased 25% after the google update so I'm not panicing yet - but I think it's fair to say that google is shutting some doors for us, and suggesting that we look for better methods of link building..

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/googles-farmer-update-analysis-of-winners-vs-losers shows EZA got hit 90% - that's "significant"!!

I do a lot of article marketing for my ecommerce sites - and seomoz tools show that my top 5 links are from there currently.

However, with recent developments should i scale back my article marketing efforts? I only ask because my key author just quit  I honestly are wondering if the big article database I have right now is sufficient, or if I should continue.

Thoughts?

This would probably be better asked at http://www.seomoz.org/about/contact where customer service peeps hang out..

I have a private blog that I use to record everything I do to the site. This is password protected and (obviously) not indexed by search engines, so it's literally a prvate journal that I often add results from mozbar to so I can compare month-to-month how my moztrust etc changes.

I also make notes inside my google analytics by adding "annotations" under the graph. This is useful to track if changes you make have any result on your traffic or conversion..

It's a matter of trust - I wouldn't buy from a site spelling mistakes (or any one of a number of problems; bad design, technical errors, broken links, no SSL, etc, etc)

In order to pull out my wallet I need to trust the people running the site are competent enough to keep my info safe, and deliver the product. Unfortunately, a simple spelling mistake in a conspicuous place would be enough to put me off.

Rightly or wrongly, I think there is an inherent distrust of foreign websites - they are tainted by stories of scammers, spammers and organised crime...

..so YES, use a spell checker and check the grammar too!