FranticFish - 3:57 pm on Dec 8, 2009 (gmt 0)

Some directory submit / CMS systems will automatically reject 'specialist' as part of their spam control, but I've only seen this with poor quality sites that take bulk submissions.

Easy to see if your friend's expert advice was right; find a few markets where 'specialist' is part of a fairly common keyphrase that people compete for and analyse the SERPs and link profiles.

My feeling on this is that this would not be an anchor text issue because Google can determine context.