Too many links with the same Anchor-text?

[castano]

My first question at SeoMoz:

Recently my gambling site has been experimenting a subtle yo-yo effect for our most sought-after keyword.

A month ago we legitimately added a PR-6 inbound link with that keyword (tragamonedas) from an institutional site of our own development. We are worried that google might have regarded that move as an illegitimate link acquisition, since those apparent troubles with our keyword appear to have started right after that link was processed. Is it too late to change the anchor text, in case that action might deliver positive results?

Also, we might have focused too much on the very same keyword in our link building campaign. Can a constant repetition of the same anchor harm our indexing reputation?

Thank you in advance and good SEO luck, Andi.

[Andy.Drinkwater]

Hi Andi,

If you think about it, external links are normally outside of your control, so Google is unlikely to penalise for this. There are more than 3,000 links to one of my customers and so many are the same phrase, but never has there been any problem in 10 years. However, variety is good wherever possible.

With your institutional site, is it hosted on the same server? Is the server your own or is it a shared resource?

If you are noticing what is known as "Google Dance" (yo-yo of positions), then this often happens until Google has decided where to place you.

Regards,

Andy

[castano]

Thank you for your comforting reply, Andy. The institutional site is hosted on the same server, though we bought an extra IP for it from our hosting provider, so I guess there's no problem there.

Well, let's hope we win this dance-contest