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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.

I thoughs so ...just checking.  I get that the PR is only updated periodically.  I just frankly find is super hypocrytical to even index these sites.  In fact I will go further and say that if Google should either. 1. Just ignore links from sites like these as part a sites link profile. 2. publish a list like a wanted board an allow you to simple disavow. I know once again I think they should think like me and I know this will not going to happen....so off I go to play the game some more.  Expect it to become harder and harder for small or even medium sized business to play this game.  In a few short years page one will belong to the large companies. I am determined to fix the link profile of this site.  I found 52k backlinks..... Needless to say lots of them are old and the site no longer exists but at least once done I will have a cleaned up link profile.  A new starting point. Thanks again Ryan Signed backlink sloger jw

Thanks for the reply.  I gathered from additional resources that there is no one site. Nor any tool that properly evaluates them as spam sites so I guess I am rolling up my sleves to get the work done. There are some obvious site I need to diavow so I will start with them.   I have not read about how you resubmit disavow but I guess you just add to the list and send it again.  I will try to make this first pass rather comprehensive. I did read about another post which seems to indicate that one you have your list there is a tool to help you evalute the sites. http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-to-check-which-links-can-harm-your-sites-rankingsI will try to post my experience with trying to use this method.

The traffic was cut in 1/2 with Penguin.  The link profile sucks but I am working on it.  I guess I will start by disavowing the obviously bad site and give it a few weeks.  The thing that is puzzling is the few good links we have will be exact match anchor becuse the name of the site is an exact match.  This is the EMD delima.

Thank for clearing that up Rand.  As I said we are seeing wild gyrations in rankings.   In the 3 years I have been doing SEO for a few sites I have never seen anything like it. Hence my rant about Google the almighty machine and their continued march away from the little guy.  The little guy does not pay the bills or create more billions... I get that. I realize that is a different topic. Thanks for the details on the ranking. Yes I use some of the other tools here on Moz.  I am just trying to understand what the ranking interval was and based on what I saw I thought it was much older.

John, Believe me - we all understand how frustrating it can be, and how difficult it can be to go with the patience path.  So I totally feel your pain!

We have very little back-link profile and most of these links are from silly sites that back-link to sites trying to build Directories to game the system.  So it sounds like your advice is look at them and if not suspect and not back anchor text then recover them otherwise leave them 404

Hi John, Let me repeat, know of no evidence of Google penalizing a site because of keyword use in the meta description tag. So including it or removing it here will most likely have little impact on your rankings, although it may impact your CTR. Having the your site name in both your title and meta description should be fine, at least from a ranking perspective. Here's a hypothetical situation where you can get into trouble: 70% of your inbound anchor text is all the same keyword The keyword is the first word of your title tag, and appears 2-3x The keyword is stuffed in your body text. Yes, it's hard NOT to have your keyword as anchor text when you have an exact match domain, but there seems to be at least some evidence of Google hitting sites that have overly optimized exact match anchor text, even for branded domains. The jury is still out, but diversifying your inbound anchor text seems like a smart strategy.

I could turn it off each night and turn it on in the am...LOL ...or better yet redirect it to google.com each night and redirect to the real site in the am. The 301 works fine no matter the page.  Chances are most people would only type www.a.com and all the backlinks are to www.b.com (the real site)... The actually site is at the incorrect spelling....but it is a common misspelling. Thanks for the help.... I did not want to get goowacked for a simple thing.  That is a good new verb ...goowacked.  If you run out and regiester the term ....send me my royalties. Cheers