Here is the story: My site was ranking high for its main terms, but recently I lost rankings with Google's Latest algo change on the 31st. So I've removed many keyword-rich outbound links from my main page. -- Lets say that my site is on Mouse Traps. My main page is optimized for : Great Mouse Traps, Affordable Mouse Traps, Electric Mouse Traps But at the bottom I had other terms that I want to rank for These terms are hyperlinked to subpages that contain articles optmized for those terms. Yet SOME of these terms contain terms that clash with my main terms that my main page is optimized for. --- My solution? I created a page called "articles" in which i have teh anchors to all of those pages. Do you think this will help my rankings, since all of those keyword rich anchor links at the bottom of my main page may have looked like keyword spam? Will it also help the main page retain its "juice" since it doesn't have so many outbound links?
It's good to limit your hyperlinks (even to internal pages) to 20 links. (10 if you can afford). You should provide links one article to another (within text or navigation) to retain your long tail SERPs.
So you're saying to do 20 links? 20 links is better than 1 link? And better than 40? Are anchor texts more valuble than regular text for long tail?
The articles idea is definately better than masses of links in the footer. Just focus on creating good content and interlink the pages well, and you should see some improvement
^^ I would second that, have all you most important pages in one page or category and link that from your footer or navigation. Else you can put a nofollow tag to your footer links and next those links add Popular Articles link without nofollow and put all your important pages in that page and let search engines find those articles from that particular page.