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Thank you for the advice. I'm not a fan of controlling anchor text either. I don't want to end up in trouble with any of the search engines. I will give it a try on a limited basis and see how it affects the search results.

I didn't get into anything moral about it. I'm going from Google's eyes -- if I am the search engine and I have xx sites with the same content to display, is there a reason I should display this site above any of those other xx identical sites? And is there a site out there that is better than those xx number of identical sites that offers more information? Google's out to make money too. If they don't satisfy their users with their results, their users will go elsewhere. To go specifically to your home page question, do you know what is putting the hop parameter in there? That's likely not helping things. I'm looking at Open Site Explorer, and this doesn't appear to be too strong of a site. It has 55 total links, from only 10 domains. The top link is from "Free For All Link Page", and there are several link pages (rather than editorial content) in your inlinks. These aren't sending the highest quality signals to your site, either.

It seems that you are focused on "links" but the message from google is all about your "pages" - which you acknowledge are full of "thin" content. I'd start removing pages or start writing new ones.  (Google is VERY clear about what they want you to do.) Lots of ecommerce affiliate sites have fantastic content.  If you are the costume man you should be able to blather endlessly about them with enthusiasm and verve.

I recieved this Google reply to my latest reconsideration request. Maybe you can gather some insight from their resonse. I'm trying to decide if its a content issue or a linking issue google is taking exception to with my site. Any insight would be appreciated. Thanks, Todd Dear site owner or webmaster of http://www.costumemachine.com/, We received a request from a site owner to reconsider http://www.costumemachine.com/ for compliance with Google's Webmaster Guidelines. We've reviewed your site and we believe that some or all of your pages still violate our quality guidelines. In order to preserve the quality of our search engine, pages from http://www.costumemachine.com/ may not appear or may not rank as highly in Google's search results, or may otherwise be considered to be less trustworthy than sites which follow the quality guidelines. If you wish to be reconsidered again, please correct or remove all pages that are outside our quality guidelines. When such changes have been made, please visit https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/reconsideration?hl=en and resubmit your site for reconsideration. If you have additional questions about how to resolve this issue, please see our Webmaster Help Forum for support. Sincerely, Google Search Quality

Hi Todd, I'm following up on some of the older unanswered questions in Q&A. Is the penalty still in place for you, or did you get it figured out? Are there any lessons learned that you can share with us, or any questions you still have? Thanks!

When all else fails, use the disavow tool http://www.seomoz.org/blog/googles-disavow-tool-take-a-deep-breath