Difference between anchor text pointing to an article in our section pages and the title of our article

[DPG_Media]

My concern is described more in details in the following hypothetic scenario(basically this is the same method that CNN site applies to its site):

In one page i have a specific anchor text e.g. "A firefighter rescued a young boy" and this one is linked to an article which if you enter you will see that it has a different title than the anchor text/short title that i mentioned above.  So the internal titlte of the article is "A firefighte rescued a young boy in Philippines while it was rainy".  I want to know whether this is a good SEO practice or not.

Regards,

Christos

[ClaytonJ]

Confused, what keyword are you trying to rank for?

Or is the question should the anchor text match the page headline it links to?

[DPG_Media]

Hi John,

I just mentioned a hypothetic scenario. My question is  if the anchor text should match the page headline it links to or not.

[ClaytonJ]

Anchor text should be natural.  So if the anchor text is an exact match too often, there is a reasonable chance of a penguin penalty. Exact matching anchor text also tends to look unnatural - so it may not entice the click throughs.

So the short answer it does not matter if natural.  If not could be heading for the penguin sin bin.

[_nitman]

Hi  Panagiotis Triantopoulos,

There isn't any hard and fast rule for it. So, go ahead with a different anchor text without a doubt. As far as it's making sense w.r.t the linked article (descriptive enough to talk about the article theme), its good to go.

Hope that answers!