steveb - 9:35 pm on Apr 7, 2007 (gmt 0)

"Are you saying that varying your anchor text can hurt you... "

This has always been the case. Wildly unnatural linking has never been a good thing. Additionally the tactic of using linking to try and make unnatural linking appear natural is a spam tactic Google has been aware of for years now.

So it should be no surprise that naturally varied anchor text might mistakenly get you in trouble when the spam scoring is looking for unnatural link patterns.

While this is an issue, I personally wouldn't spend two seconds worrying about it. Linking naturally coincidentally normally works best for search engines and users. Sometimes Google misinterprets signals, but no matter what you do they will sometimes misinterpret signals (sometimes lowering scores and sometimes raising scores, for incorrect reasons).