Nothing can drive home the importance of link text better than a situation back in 2006 when if you searched for the phrase “miserable failure” on Google, the number-one result was the official bio page for the sitting US president, George W. Bush. The second result was someone from the opposite ideological perspective, filmmaker Michael Moore. Neither of these men wanted to rank for those keywords, nor did they have those keywords on their websites. A group of people got together and began linking to the pages for Mr. Bush and a different group linked to the pages of Mr. Moore using the same phrase “miserable failure.” Enough people did this that Google associated both sites with that search term, viewing the link text as a label for that site. Thus, when you searched “miserable failure,” the pages for these men came up. Today we call this Google bombing. Since then, Google has changed its algorithm to decrease the likelihood of this kind of campaign working. That said, the link text you choose is still very important.