Anchor text is still important ?

Last month, there was a big talk between webmasters and SEO experts regarding anchor text. The discussion was started by Patrick Altoft on Blogstorm. But Nick Stamoulis criticized it big time on searchengineoptimizationjournal.com within a few days of that post. Nick aslo linked to Google Webmaster Central, to prove his wordings.  Any way, I am not gonna talk about the same facts, but a nice idea that proves that anchor text still worth it’s value.

Today, we had a section by Iyad Tibi, Head of Search at Flip Media on Changing SEO strategies. To prove the importance of anchor text, he Googled “Click here” the most used anchor text. The Google result turned Adobe Reader Download page as first. When we analyzed the page, there was no text “click here” in that page at all!. And still the page is coming first out of 1,430,000,000 search results. The reason is, most of the websites links to adobe reader download page saying “Click here to download adobe reader”

Don’t this simply proves that anchor text is still important ?  So, it is better to have a link for title of item’s listing page more than having a repeated “read more” with that annoying arrow.