I alway use them, why not, it is beater for visitors and I think there is impact in search engines ...
Yes, it is important to use titles - where possible, since not all sources of backlinks will allow them. It is a descriptive term that is definatly looked at by search engines and who knows if it will carry extra weight at some point in the future.
Yes it can if you add 50 or 100 keywords ... really how it can hurt if you write about what is link ...
I told that from my experience... I know about very big website that co-worker of mine was the seo consultant of the site. The site got banned from Google for long period of time ... Just after they removed that titles from the links they got their rankings back. That called over optimization.
I can say entirely the opposite. I have several sites all sitting comfortably at #1,even others in the same niche at #2 and i always use the title tag where possible. Id say, from experience, it was something else that got you banned.
The title attribute to a textual link plays very little part in SEO but in a competitive situation, that little effect could be the edge over competition. Like it has been said before, it cant hurt to put them in. Some disadvantages and advantages of the 'title' attribute are as such; Advantages; Usability - people are more aware of the link on hover over Keyword density (in code) - your code will contain extra keywords (if your title tag is your keyword) Disadvantage; Code to content ratio - may become worse as a result. Anybody else feel like adding to the list?
I think the the title words in your link are important, If you want to rank high for a particular keyword then it's got to be better to have that word as the title rather than just having your web url there