Am I Stuffing Internal Anchor Text?

[AWCthreads]

We've got about 1,700 products and 6,600 pages on our site. I recently finished up adding similar product links and popular category links to our product and category pages in an effort to juice up the pages that sell and make us money.

I also added a category html sitemap in the footer.

A couple of the targeted category rankings are moving down.

Am I possible accruing a penalty for overusing anchor text?

Is this internal linking strategy poor form?

Thanks.

[Copstead]

If you have your sitemap.xml and have submitted it to both Google and Bing, then you should be fine.

[AWCthreads]

Agreed on the silo groupings (neighborhoods). I've got some retooling to do. Thanks for that.

Its interesting on the sitemap deal. Some pro's recommend it always. Some don't like them at all. Now you're commonly seeing product indexes and category indexes.

I'm inclined to get rid of it (I'm just afraid my site was not set up optimally so I'm retooling there as well).

[Copstead]

If adding links, try to keep the links within the same category.  For example on the product page you provided, I would have links to the other 5 horse turnout blankets.

The goal with internal linking is to focus category and silo groupings.  Or if you think of each page and remember that everything on that page should be related to what you want to rank for.

And to answer your overall question, I don't believe the changes you have made would hurt you.  But really try to focus your links as groups.

As for sitemaps, if you have correctly designed your site, a sitemap really isn't necessary, so I would probably get rid of it.

[AWCthreads]

Thanks Brent. Here's a product page and here is our sitemap in the footer.

[Copstead]

There are so many factors that could play into this.  Yes and No.  I would have to take a look at an example to get you a better answer.