When is anchor text spam?

anchor text spam

[eztrip]

Hi -
If I have sets of pages where widgets are broken down by sections, is it considered spam to have the word widget after each section, like:

Section 1 Widgets
Section 2 Widgets
Section 3 Widgets

for say 50 or 100 links on a page. The page as it currently stands just has
Section 1
Section 2
Section 3

but after reading up on Anchor text and it's importance, I'm wondering if I should adjust the pages. But at the same, time, adding it isn't really helping my users out as they already know they're on a Widget page and I really don't want to get penalized for spamming as I've had very good results in the past 3 months by playing by the rules (which thanks to everyon e on this forum are incredibly effective and easy to abide by :-)).

Thanks for any advice

Mike

[tedster]

My recent experiments say don't add "widgets" to all your anchor text, just because it makes each separate instance of anchor text look good.

On almost every page where I did this recently, I seem to have tripped some kind of automatic demotion - like down 30 positions. I'm sure the kw density for those pages was much too high. In fact when I looked at those pages in the Google Cache, with each instance of the kw in boldface, it immediately looked quite comical and WAY too exaggerated.

As you say, the user already knows they are on a widget site -- so now I'm only using the word in a few links, just where it's most natural. Unfortunately my over the top actions seem to have demoted the pages for a period of unknown duration.

On the bright side, however, was a corresponding jump in Inktomi (MSN) traffic. Apparently I didn't trip any filters on excessive density over there, if they even have such a thing. Right now MSN is the top referer for these pages and the total traffic has stayed about the same.

[Kirby]

My experience mirrors Tedster's, even the increase from M$N. I removed the offending text and moved from 14 to 6 for one kw, from 17 to 1 for another and from 8 to 1 for another kw.

Since lost a bit of traffic from M$N, but the increase from Google more than makes up for it.