All y'all SEO clever men be saying that paid directories (and fo' sho unpaid ones) ain't worth diddly.So how come when I open a can of Open Site Explorer on the a** of my (breathin'-down-my-neck) rivals, their (meant to be worthless) directories be passin' them lots and lots of link love? Riddle me that, people.

FWIW, I had a similar problem, in that one of my internal pages had 1,500 total links -- of which approx 1,425 were internal and had exactly the same three-word exact-match anchor text.

The page was ranking top 5 pre-Penguin for the keyword. Post Penguin, it sunk like a stone. A very heavy stone. As in, not in top #100. I've changed the links but still haven't recovered 10 months on.

Bizarrely, the page still ranks ok for other keywords, which makes me suspect some kind of manual keyword-specific penalty.