Internal linking anchor text with automated ASP.NET link building

[Raptor-crew]

Hi Everyone

I really need some help here, the problem I have must be one that many have.  I have a simple e-commerce style website so 1 product page can in fact get 40-50 internal links to it.  These links come from a mixture of:

1. The parent category pages that the product sits on (Rugged PDA) and in turn the 10 filter pages of this category page (Rugged PDA, ordered by battery size).

2. Alternative product list on other product pages,  So many products link to each other as alternatives. From Google analytics we can see that visitors like to browse product to product seeing 5 alternatives on each page with titles like "Smaller", "more rugged" etc.

3. Manufactuer pages, so we have a link to each product from each manufacturer home page where we talk lots about each manufacture we resell.

We also have links from images used in the website.

So its a nice usable website but we're finding that Google is still telling us in Webmaster tools that it thinks some links are dubious and we're trying to find out why.  We only now have 190 external links to the website, most are internal and from the website or our blog on a subdomain.

The problem we think is that we generate the category and products pages all dynamically so the anchor text is looking the same.  Will this potentially create issues for us?

Dave

[Raptor-crew]

I just re-read the above and thought I could actually summarise this far better, with the help of a response from another question I have open!

Does anchor text on internally linking pages matter at all or is it OK and an issue that only matters with external links now?

Dave

[Everett]

Hello Dave,

Overoptimized internal linking text can have a negative impact on your site's rankings in Google. Well-optimized, user-friendly internal linking text that does not go overboard can have a positive impact on your site's rankings in Google.

For example:
If the anchor text of all internal links going into your "Blue Widgets" says "Buy Blue Widgets Online" and you have pages for "Red Widgets" that have hundreds of internal links saying "Buy Red Widgets Online" and the same for Green Widgets, etc... that is probably overoptimized. It would be better if they all just said the name of the category (i.e. Blue Widgets, Red Widgets, Green Widgets) since the "Buy... Online" part is implied.

I hope this answers your question. Good luck!