The string 'cialis' is in 'specialist' - avoid it in links?

[AjiNIMC]

How valid is this? One of my friend's company has this as a guideline, they learned it from an expert.

As a guideline "No use the words ‘specialist’, ‘specialising’, etc in linking as they contain the word ‘cialis’"

[tedster]

I don't think anchor text would be an issue - semantic analysis seems to be better than that today. But you might want to avoid using the word in file names. Because some web developers simply concatenate the words in filenames, I do see occasional evidence that "hidden words" get picked up.

[FranticFish]

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.

[Lame_Wolf]

Just don't mention that you are a specialist that works long and hard all day. ;)

[Hissingsid]

I have one site that does very well on Google and has this word 4 times on the page that ranks the highest. However the site has a -50 penalty on Yahoo. Perhaps this is the reason.

Cheers

Sid

[piatkow]

There are a number of words, including place names, that trip filters because of embedded character strings. I hadn't heard of "specialist" being one that normally had issues.

[panicbutton]

"Just don't mention that you are a specialist that works long and hard all day. ;)"

LOL, very good

[martinibuster]

>>>because of embedded character strings...

You're right. I would add that it could be problematic if the words are in the URL. But I'm fairly confident it won't be an issue if it's merely text on the page. But I'd like to emphazie the word "could" because I don't think this happens frequently, and I have a feeling the engineers have thought about this and can take into account surrounding text to understand the difference between for example, a therapist and the alternative.