For anyone who had any doubt that the anchor text matters, behold, a personal example proving it. Doing a vanity search for my own name in Google produces the following SERP:
Note that the Flickr page is currently outranking the homepage of my site. Why is that? Well, this particular Flickr page is the main page for the Google Fridge Giveaway I held a couple months ago. So many people linked to the image using my name as anchor text, it is now outranking the root domain of my site!
The really interesting part is that nowhere on the Flickr page does it say “dan perry”. My username is “danperry.com”, but nowhere on the page do you see my name with a space between the first and last names.
Anchor text still rules, and I have the screenshot to prove it.
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