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An additional advantage is having a short title means you don't spread out the value among many words, though again it does have it's limits.

Why not just create a few pages with short titles each having the task of pulling in people for that specific search like this:

index page: Delicious small blue widgets
page a: Blue widgets
page b: Small widgets
page c: Small blue widgets
page d: Delicious widgets
page e: Delicious blue widgets
page f: Delicious small widgets

I'm not sure I put the question the right way.

1. Is it a fact that you will get penalized if you have exactly the same text in a link as in the title on the page you are linking to.?

2. I agree with your strategy Bobby, but if u isolate it just to one of those pages. How should the link look like if it cant be the same as the title?

Example:
Link anchor text: "delicious small blue widgets" to Page with title: "blue widgets"
or
Link anchor text "blue widgets" to Page with title "delicious small blue widgets"

Appreciate your answer.

Now...I have seen stuff like this floating around and I haven't made sense of it yet.

If I am creating a site about loacal restaurants, and I want to write an article about asian cuisine. I link to "O'Brians Chinese Restautant". Are you saying that it's a bad thing to use the business name as the anchor text because it's likely that it's also the title of their website.

There would be a penalty for such a thing, or no?

I can't believe that there would be a penalty for using the title of a site as the anhcor text. That's very much a standard practice. I assume that this "penalty" is a misnomer or misunderstanding.

Saying "not an advantage" would be better? That it would be better to use key words as anchor text for other reasons?

At the end of last year Google made a change in their algo. The result was dramatic and many sites disappeared from the top of the SERPs. It was said that it was an OOP(over optimization penalty).

The discussions that went on during the next months indicated that pages that had exactly the same title as the links that were pointing to them were the ones that were hit extra hard.

My question was, is this a fact?

If it is, then how should you design the link and titels from the examples I made above?

In all honesty I don't think there is anyone who can say for sure what Google does, not even GoogleGuy for that matter. I'd even guess that the guys programming the algorithm probably are surprised at times by what comes out of the index.

In any case I think we can make a few basic assumptions.

a.) Google is trying to weed out "spam" from their data base, or try to discourage the use of certain optimization techniques.

b.) Links TO a website still play an important role in determining PR and probably where pages appear for certain searches.

c.) Anchor text throughout a site AND from different sites will be used to determine what the site is about.

Ok, so here's my guess.

Links with the exact same title from within the site probably have little significance, or are counted as just one link.

Links from outside the site (external links) with exact title probably count significantly as they could not penalize your site because others decided to link to it. If so then your competitors could simply establish lots of domains with different IP addresses and use them to shoot you down.

The idea of NOT using exact phrases that match the title while linking is probably the best idea in that it *appears* to be a natural link and not one that was agreed upon by webmasters.

thanks for for your answer. I'll try out some diffrent angels and see what happens.