I like your idea JasonC, but there is still the problem of having a description of "link1".

I haven't put much thought into this, but...

Instead of changing the description text between the tags change the url to an anchor tag that brings you to a box (hopefully displayed alongside the same paragraph) where the links are given with the appropriate description text.

This would remove them from the *flow* and I don't know what effect it would have on pagerank, but the text for the link would work better.

one link after another
By consecutive links I mean a whole load of content that has one link after another in it. I see why it's done - because there's more than one link that applies to a certain statement, but there's got to be a better way.

I was brought up to believe (that's right, it coincided with potty training) that the text that makes up a link should be the actual description of what's going on at the destination of that link. But in the above example, for example, neither 'one', 'link', 'after' or 'another' describe anything on their own. 'one link after another' does but not 'one', 'link', 'after' or 'another'.