Internal Anchor Text Penalty Clarification

[AWCthreads]

I believe we may be seeing the initial stages of a penalty for over-using internal anchor text on our ecommerce site.

Per Rand and other training, we added related product links and popular category links to our product and category pages. At the time, we did not have an html sitemap in the footer.

We're a small to medium sized site with 1,700+ products. We have since added an html sitemap of our categories to our footer.

Now we have category links in the sitemap and category pages and product pages with targeted anchor text.

I'm beginning to see downward movement on some of those targeted categories.

If I have an html sitemap in the footer (category index) should I get rid of the popular category links throughout the rest of the site?

Also, with more frequency, I'm seeing a "product index" and "category index" in footers. Is this a best practice?

Thanks.

[AWCthreads]

Here's a dated thread (2009) from Rand.

And another from a daily blog a few days ago.

Rand's blog #2 is what concerns me.

Take this page for example (Alan, hold your breath this is a CMS site). The intent is to channel the juice to those pages.

Every page on our site has a similar link strategy. I've tried to link according to the product "neighborhood" or to similar/related pages. The only exception is the link to our western horse tack page. I've tried to link to the western tack page from just about every other product and category page.

The result is a sizable increase in page authority, but just recently the page rank has dropped significantly.

My understanding from other threads is that a person can "stuff" anchor text and accrue a penalty for it.

Alan, is your article suggesting an html sitemap is not necessary if I'm conducting targeted linking on product and category pages?

[AlanMosley]

nor me.

but seeing you have added a sitemap to your footer, it may be that you have changed your internal linking stucture and the flow of link juice around your site.

Havering a sitemap on every page means your link juice is not being used to its otimum

http://thatsit.com.au/seo/tutorials/a-simple-explanation-of-pagerank

[EGOL]

I believe we may be seeing the initial stages of a penalty for over-using internal anchor text on our ecommerce site.

A penalty for internal anchor text?

I've never heard of that.

[realpage]

I literally just got off the phone with Jake over at Virante (in NC) and one thing he was mentioning was Anchor Text penalization and that it occurs on the keyword level. If/when you get dinged on the keyword level and presumably with 1700 products that could be some serious keyword cannibalization. Try just using the/a brand name URL [http://www.youdomain.com] or [http://www.afilliatesdomain.com] when utilizing Anchor Text. Google will not penalize you on a "brand level" whereas they might for being hyper-prolific with "Green Widgets" or some other generic popularized keyword (phrase).

Shameless Plug: follow me @derZukunft

Good luck and good on ya,

Cheers, 
Brian