Links and how they count?

[BobAnderson]

We managed to get ourselves out of a penalty 6 months ago and 100 days later after the message of penalty removable we finally felt that we were moving back on track (not a lot of movement before and 50% down due to links being taken away), we have around 120 really high quality links but 95% of them are urls or the business name.

Anyway we still have a couple of pages that I feel are fairly down on rankings and most of the links as mentioned above are high quality but they are either anchor text of the website name or url my main question is that when looking at my competitors I see that they have the same or less links and from much less powerful places (most I would not touch) but they seem to have a ratio of 5 - 10 % of the links are the keywords they are trying to rank for.

My question is if you have 50 links from better places but they are unrelated terms such as the web site name or just urls and you have 50 links from average places but 5 - 10% are on related terms to what you are trying to rank for which ones would win out.

[KaneJamison]

Agreed with Chris. I'd prefer to have a ton of branded links (whether it's URL or brand name) and then target whatever keyword I want on the actual page.

[Chris.Menke]

A fair amount of value would have to do with the relevancy of the sites/pages with the links to the pages they're linking to. If they're not relevant to each other, I'd say all bets are off.  If they are relevant to each other, then the answer is easy--it's another toss up.

The authority of the branded links from the better (thematically relevant) sites will certainly help with the authority of the page they're linking to but if that page isn't optimized well for a particular keyword, the additional authority may not help it rank better for a hoped-for keyword--if it is well optimized the link could help quite a bit.

On the other hand, the relevance provided by the anchor text from a link on a thematically relevant page could certainly be beneficial but it would depend on how exactly the anchor text matched the target keyword, how many other back links also contained the exact same anchor text.

On a site with 120 back links, 5-10 of them with exact match anchor text is a pretty obvious footprint and if I had my choice today, I'd prefer the authority links over the keyword links.