Changing Anchor Text May Raise A Red Flag

A WebmasterWorld thread has a webmaster asking if changing the anchor text he has been using for links to his site to something "more natural" would lead to a confirmation that he has been up to some bad link building.

In short, does Google have algorithms to detect anchor text changes and if so, do those algorithms detect these sorts of changes and raise a red flag on sites doing it.

For example, that old old big blue pineapple chair topic and you decide that you want to link to the domain name pinechair.com as PineChair, as opposed to the anchor text you've been using for years of [big blue pineapple chair].

From:

To:

Now, you go through as many of the old back links as possible and update them from the old to the new anchor text.

Will that action set you deeper into a link penalty or help improve things? Or are we looking to deeply into the topic?

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.