Back in 2008, Moz published a report claiming the first anchor text counts - meaning, if you have a web page that has two or more links going to the same page, but the anchor text of those links differ, Google would pick the first anchor text and ignore the ones in the past.
We covered that back in 2008 and then SEOs began debating the validity of the study. Later on Branko confirmed the claims, questioning the scientific nature of the other studies.
Now, Google's Matt Cutts comes out with a video saying in 2009, Google may (which means did, imo) have picked one of the anchor texts and not counted the other. He did not say the first, but it is likely the first. First how? First in source code or based on skipping the navigation. That is unsure, but watch the video:
Either way, SEOs like to obsess about these things - Cutts says, don't.
It changes and he clearly didn't check to see what Google does now, in 2014.
