Tonearm - 6:03 pm on Apr 22, 2012 (gmt 0)

I have a lot of anchor text on my pages that are most likely triggering over-optimization penalties. Would you:

1. move anchor text like "Round Widgets, Purple Widgets, etc" entirely into images

2. remove only "Widgets" and leave "Round" and "Purple" as anchor text

3. remove only "Widgets" but unlink "Round" and "Purple" leaving them as regular text

The content of these pages is almost entirely made up of these links which each consist of an image and anchor text. Could #1 reduce the volume of content in Google's eyes to the point that it creates a different ranking problem?

Should #1 and #3 be considered unnecessary deoptimization since they remove anchor text that isn't overused on the page?