Recently, a Search Engine Watch Forums thread asked a question, whether it is helpful or harmful to vary your anchor text in your SEO efforts, and should the anchor text be differentiated or not?

“Hey Guys, If you had 5000 backlinks and 90% of them all used similar anchor text of 1-4 words, would you be concerned? I'm in a situation where I need to decide to differentiate my anchor text for natural appearance, or continue to build strong focused backlinks with the same anchor text. So far I have not seen any penalties and we are getting excellent SERPs with the way things have gone, but I'm concerned this may not stay the same if Google decides our back link summary is not natural.Any opinions?”

The answer to this quizzical is yes, you do need to vary your anchor text, as is echoed by AussieWebmaster on the forum, “always vary your anchor text - for that number you should have 20-25 different keywords at the low end”

While there's no favorite area for doing so, it needs to be optimized well. What you should do is make sure that the anchor text is well optimized, moreover you need to make sure that such an effort doesn't look unnatural or spammy.

The discussion continues at Search Engine Watch Forums.