I just wanted know if you guys thought that there would be a penalty for having too many links on a page that had your target keyword on it. For example, let's suppose you had a site which was dedicated to widgets. And let's suppose that you had 20-40 links on the page to other pages within your site with the links named "green widgets," "blue widgets," "pink widgets," etc... Would the search engines consider this "spamming and lower the overall significance of the page or would they call it optimizing and reward it in the SERPs?
I don't think this practice would be considered spamming only when you keep the links limited to 10-15 links. Above that would be detrimental for your site..
Why would you say 10-15? Look at apartments.com. They have been # 1 for years and they have over 50 of such links on their homepage or would you say they are somehow privileged?