It's hard to tell without seeing your copy, but it sounds like you're talking about internal links within your own site. Google is talking about outbound links. Internal anchor text (linking within your site) is rarely penalized.
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Posts made by Dr-Pete
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RE: Lost 50% google traffic in one day - panic?posted in Algorithm Updates
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RE: Lost 50% google traffic in one day - panic?posted in Algorithm Updates
Just want to let people know that I believe this is just an overall quality control form. It's worth a try, but I don't expect they'll take action on individual sites (I could be wrong, but don't get your hopes up, in other words).
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RE: Lost 50% google traffic in one day - panic?posted in Algorithm Updates
The so-called "over-optimization" penalty definitely hit hard, sometime between 4/24-4/25. It is possible to see Google make a correction, but it doesn't appear that there were major changes between 4/25-4/26. Of course, this just happened, so we don't have much data.
Given the large scale of the drop and that this is a confirmed algorithm change, I think you have to start there. This is the official post from Google and I see that someone has already linked to Rand's post:
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2012/04/another-step-to-reward-high-quality.html
Look specifically at the terms that dropped. Are you aggressively targeting those terms (with keyword stuff, inbound anchor text, etc.)? I think the "Don't Panic" advice has some merit - if you over-optimize to reverse over-optimize, you've just made even more of a mess. I'm not saying to sit on your hands, but dig deep into the analysis and put together a reasonable plan of attack - don't just start changing things at random.