1script - 2:23 pm on Oct 13, 2006 (gmt 0)

My own concern is the change to the dealing with internal linking structures. I am wondering if you can penalise your own pages with your own internal navigation because of optimising those pages and having that keyword pointing to it from the internal navigational structure. Even though these internal links are legitimate in that they describe the page to the user, because of other elements already in place it can be the straw that breaks the camels back so to speak.

Wow, soapystar, that's a great suggestion but a frightening one. When talking about internal links, where do you draw a line of over-optimization? I have a rather large site about an industry where we have lots of standards names as well as part numbers are repeated in great many anchors. Say, you have a part and then you have pages about installing it, testing, troubleshooting etc and you may have literally hundreds of pages with the part's name in the anchor. Actually, I think this used to be exactly what brought my site to #1 SERP for that part's name. So, now it turns around and bites my a..? Wow, man, I do see that possibly happening but that would be a complete disaster 'cause the whole site's navigation is based on this sort of somewhat similar anchors.

And just to clarify things: I don't buy links and don't sell them either and there are not too many outgoing external links from each individual page. There are thousands from the site as a whole but only handful from each individual page.