Hi guys

Some advice if you don't mind. I manage a network of sites and am looking at revisiting my internal linking strategy as a project. There seem to be various suggestions out there as to how to do this although many of the more recent ones allude to the fact that linking up and sideways is most effective which is something that I have done myself quite regularly.

However, while this looks nice structurally and might make perfect sense for a site where all the relevant content/articles are nicely structured in this way, the reality is that I often have articles and pages which could point to relevant content almost anywhere, particularly on the larger sites.

Looking at some of the sites it's clear I have over time fallen into the trap of linking articles to articles that are barely relevant, purely to get more links pointing at an article.

I am thinking that with this project I will start to analyse each page and remove internal links to articles with only tenuous relevency and add in new links to articles with more relevancy, regardless of where they sit in the site structure.

Does this make sense? Or would you really try and keep the up and sideways approach by shifting content around? Obviously the latter way becomes a big old job with redirects and stuff - in fact it's probably not viable on one or two of the larger sites - but if it has significant value in 2011 then maybe it's worth considering.

Your opinions and views on these or any other effective internal linking ideas in the current climate would be appreciated before I dive in.

Many thanks,

Simsi.