Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Submitting to 20 or 30 directories should not have any negative impact at all. Another thing to remember is that the engines will not find these links at the same time anyway. They will be found when each of those pages are crawled which could be days or in some cases weeks and months. So no, no problems at all.

Will google actually be penalizing me for just targeting one keyword, hence the lower ranking?

Thanks. I am tasked with updating and refining our current process for my boss. We do use most of the common best practices...but we certainly want to continually enhance our process.

I don't know on exact ratios, but I think it is effective to vary your anchor text. I believe that search engines expect handwritten content to have variation.

Oh. I see that my solution below was already suggested! Whoops!

If it's just this one link on one website then don't worry at all! Getting too many of these links will be a problem, but the odd one will not be a problem. How many sites are linked to from the individual page that you have your link on? You dont want to appear in amongst a lot of spammy links.

I am often amazed at the rankings that can be obtained from only a few good links.

I am about half way through this webinar - its very good so far - not sure I will need training after all now.  Thanks Adam.

Does your aggregator cause a lot of duplicate content issues? I've seen a few Youmoz posts or PRO Questions where some sites have lost up to and over 50% of their traffic. Please describe in a little more depth. I don't like these online translators!!

Yeah we've got our real list of links at the ready for launch, just laying some ground work lower quality stuff to diversify the link profile. Link bait's at the ready too! Thanks Dejan SEO

I would also say manufacturers would be authority sites.  For instance if you ran a camera site, Nikon, Sony, and other popular manufacturers would be authority links for the camera niche.  Really any creator of an original product will be considered authority.  So any NBA team or other sports franchise homepage would be an authority too. I would also say any of the top 500 or 1000 sites on the internet (I believe SEOmoz has a 500 list) are close to being authorities.  This won't always hold true but regardless a link from one of those sites will be strong.

It works better for my sites that offer a valuable services and aren't just shopping or ads.  But if you get creative with some useful or helpful content, those outlets will be more likely to link to you.