Still Not Convinced???

Am I still unable to convince you that using keywords as anchor text could be harming your links?

I maintain 2 very similar golf sites for customers. Very similar indeed. Both take a product feed from the same merchant and use it to create a list of brands that merchant sells and a list of product categories for that merchant, linking to the individual items.

Both sites are and have been for a while page rank 3. Both list all products & categories on the home page and the structure of the 2 sites is very similar. What, apart from the style, is different about the sites?

Basically, the second site uses truncated descriptions and includes the item name & price of the item in the anchor text (as opposed to just the item name). Also, the first site appends the word 'Golf' after every brand name. Given that the product list is probably a lot of keywords (Golf Clubs, Golf Bags etc) and we now have 'adidas golf', 'nike golf' etc, most of the anchor texts in the first site could be said to be keyword related.

Guess which site has recently been getting the most commissions from search engine visitors – the second site, the one with the less important keywords in the search terms.