Linking Back To Homepage

I've seen varying opinions on this and just wondering what are some thoughts on this. When linking your blog posts or internal pages back to your homepage, do you use anchored text or just the url?

Some people say that Google penalizes when using anchor links while others say that there's no issue with anchor links........

Ive done both linking back to homepage with main keyword, and no link at all. Havnt really noticed any difference between the two.

I use anchor text and url and get decent results. I have never heard that G penalizes for anchor text, but that would not surprise me.