Google 50 changes for March, including two that concerned anchor text. They were: "Tweaks to handling of anchor text. [launch codename "PC"] This month we turned off a classifier related to anchor text (the visible text appearing in links). Our experimental data suggested that other methods of anchor processing had greater success, so turning off this component made our scoring cleaner and more robust." and: "Better interpretation and use of anchor text. We’ve improved systems we use to interpret and use anchor text, and determine how relevant a given anchor might be for a given query and website." (source: http://insidesearch.blogspot.com/2012/04/search-quality-highlights-50-changes.html) They are vague (as usual), your thoughts please on what they may actually mean?
Anchors like click here and Buy Now had no impact on search engines but now they would have an impact by considering the text around those links. Also same Anchors like sitewide links are killer for any site and this has happened to one of my friends site who had lot of sitewide links. I am in process of writing about it on my blog but is really very busy with lot of stuff these days.
I had heard about the "click here" thing, and I guess that would be good for those sites who don't do SEO and haven't found ways of replacing it (and similar phrases) with something else to make a relevant anchor, and in those cases where it just makes plain sense to use something like "buy now". I'd be quite pleased about the sitewide links, because from what I've been able to check, a number of my competitors have different domains that all link to each other in this way. I only have two sites and they do link to each other but not sitewide.