If those comments are generating traffic it's ok, but I'd apply a nofollow tag to the links. They're simply not natural.

I'd mix things. The best, most informative, image rich article should go on the client's website (they'll attract natural links over time, which are the best), some good articles could be written for gust blogging (work only with high quality blogs), a few articles on article directories.

It's been a while since I haven't used GWT, but I thing you have a limit of 500 requests/day or something like that.

As soon as those requests are processed the counter resets.

Hi BJ

I'd use the URL removal tool only after I'd make sure that I used rel=canonical (to point out which is the actual URL Google should consider "legit", use noindex, follow meta tag for the pages you don't want google to index - like tag or category pages or subpages -).

You can also use strings when removing pages, which may be way more effective than removing them one by one: eg: http://www.example.com/category/ - Google will remove all matching URLs.

But I strongly advise you to make sure you minimize as much as you can the duplicate content generation and use the two methods I highlighted above.

Hope it helps.

Philip,

Letting Google to follow the archive pages, helps it to determine the website's hierarchy.

Google can handle duplicate content of a website.

Excluding tag or category archives from Google's index, may lead to loosing some visitors. Here is a nice wrap up regarding this issue.

If you use Yoast's SEO plugin, you can let Google index only the main page of the archive pages and noindex the rest of them (page1, page 2 etc.)

I would place a noindex meta tag for date archives, though.

Hope that helps, cheers.