Anchor text, does it's exact composition matter?

eg. anchor : Diamond Engagement Rings does what for search term Rings?

[Namaste]

Since Google's latest update, my ranking for the word "rings" has slipped from the 20s to the the 80s, but my top 10 rank is maintained for "diamond rings" and "engagement rings"

The identifiable change that has possibly influenced this is that a majority of the inward links to my website from other websites now contain the words "Diamond Engagement Rings" instead of just "Rings". All the site issuing the links to me are PR5-PR7

does anyone have anything on this?

[Dante_Maure]

Every additional word in the anchor text dilutes relevancy for the partial string matches.

That being said, it's generally better to rank highly for specific key phrases than for a single generic keyword.

[pshea]

Could it be all the competition kicking in from the Lord of the Rings?

[Beachboy]

Does its exact composition matter? Search engines are notoriously phrase-sensitive, so yes. If "new york green widgets" happened to be a highly competitive phrase, your placement will differ with:

new york green widgets
new green york widgets
green widgets new york...and so on.

If your page is optimized for: new york green widgets, and the inbound text link anchor text reflects the same phrase, then odds are pretty good you will score high for that phrase. Scramble the text of those inbound links and the efficiency of them will be reduced. However, I think it's smart to mix in some amount of variety of phraseology. One doesn't want to stand out too much. ;)