[branica]

Another great post to follow in WMW - about text links and anchor text. I have seen this issue and I am currently making changes to see if I can get my site out of the over-optimized state

Possibly too many links all at once in too short a period, identical link-text, and a site redesign to boot. If those 40 new links make up 50% of all your links, then that would certainly register on Googlebot's radar. Your analysis time-frame is also far too short; Many of these changes won't fully manifest themselves in search results for months. For example, the little green PageRank bar in the Google Toolbar often takes 90 days and more to reflect any changes; It's updated very infrequently. And PageRank is a pretty useless metric anyway -- Not that more is not better, it's just not a useful metric.

Nonetheless, folks tweak a site on Monday, and from Tuesday onward are checking that TBPR every day -- After several months, I'd imagine it gets rather tedious.

Diversify your link text: Consider synonyms and semantically-related phrases. Go slow and steady. Work on improving your site with an eye toward earning unsolicited links from authority sites for the next 90 days to six months, then check the results and let us know how you're doing.

Some folks already have really great sites, and yet are impatiently focused on seeing instant results; To them, I recommend a long vacation in a place with no internet service available. Otherwise, they're likely to obsess on their sites, and tweak them into oblivion. In this business, patience is worth a lot. If you've only got one site to experiment with, then gaining useful data can take years... And by then, the resulting conclusions may no longer hold true.

and

>> In the offline world, do you try to trick the phone company into putting your business name on the cover of its directory?

In the offline world listings aren't based on some set of vague quality guidelines (algos) either. Ya pays yer money and they add your listing. On another note, you can't trick the phone company into putting you on the cover, but businesses have been abusing the alpha sort for years. Surely you don't think there are so many business named AAA Whatever because it's such a catchy name? Same technique worked quite well in the Y! directory of old too.

>>does google eventually forgive for aggressive link building?

Certainly. I've helped people recover from bad linking strategies. You'd be surprised at what a few good links can do.

>>The anchor text / accompanying content was mostly identical.

That's something I certainly advise against.

By the way, digitalghost has been posting some awesome information! Read the rest of the thread here: http://www.webmasterworld.com/google/3432313.htm