E-Commerce

[freestone]

I have an E-Commerce site with tons of categories.  These categories live on each product page for easy navigation of the site.  This means that the entire site has some 500 internal links with optimized anchor text.  Is this an issue and if so .....what to do.

[soralsokal]

As far as I know internal anchor text can't be 'over-optimized'. This only is the case for external sites linking to you.

[JaneCopland]

This should not cause a problem. As soralsokal says, internal anchor text linking isn't a regular problem for over-optimisation; the only way you'd be in danger of attracting unwanted search engine attention is if you were churning out hundreds of low-quality blog posts, linking internally over and over again to commercial pages with spammy anchor text.

Google is used to seeing navigational links on ecommerce sites, the vast majority of which are "optimised". The optimisation is fine; it's for users. You wouldn't link to your wine page with any other anchor than "wine" because it tells people what the page will be about Google knows this; navigational elements like this are fine as a result.