Like you say – too many people get hung up on one idea and loose site of the bigger picture.

Back to the serious stuff.
Surrounding text is very important and anchor text needs surronding text on topic to be all it can be. Keep this in mind.

I found that link while reading the Copyblogger post. It is an arguable, but definitely a valid point.

I think it is a bad idea to just use “click here” with no additional clues as to what you will find if you do.

What I am recommending is that you tell the user what he or she will expect in the text surrounding the link. Maybe some people with disabilities will miss that, but maybe they won’t.

Your reasoning makes sense (that it looks natural etc). Just a tip that this is not always the most accessible text (i.e. talking about accessibility for people with disabilities, in particular blindness in this case). There is a fair bit of research as to why link text like “click here” isn’t as useful from an accessibility perspective. So much so that it made the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0 as a priority 2 suggestion: http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG10/wai-pageauth.html#tech-meaningful-links

To be fair, some of those guidelines can be vague, but just wanted to add a different angle to this.

I think obsessing about anything really is rather silly because things are forever changing. … I spend the rest of my time focusing on creating good content.

Caroline – Thanks for your comment. You are spending your time wisely.

What if an evil black hat DMOZ editor add a victim to DMOZ with some dodgy description? It also raises some issues with paid links. Paid links on sites are usually pretty easy to find, but a paid paragraph is a different story. It could open up a whole new door way to abuse.

David – As I said before, it is better to try to rank based on the authority of the site vs based on the incoming link text or text surrounding the links. It is a more stable approach. Remember my post about negative SEOs?

…where the search engines can actually ‘understand’ the content within a page a rank accordingly. Although thats a long way off. Obviously.

Neil – I think so too.

I did try playing around with something similar for non-competative keywords. I was putting similar content of a few spare domains and experimenting with inter-linking them for low competiton keywords and it did appear to me that it had some effect. Although it is hard to tell since you don’t know what variables are at work. I was actually focusing on the title tag of the page rather than the paragraph text.

As I pointed out on Joost’s blog there could be some implications to implementing something such as this. What if an evil black hat DMOZ editor add a victim to DMOZ with some dodgy description? It also raises some issues with paid links. Paid links on sites are usually pretty easy to find, but a paid paragraph is a different story. It could open up a whole new door way to abuse.

I think it’s a natural progression towards the ultimate goal where the search engines can actually ‘understand’ the content within a page a rank accordingly. Although thats a long way off. Obviously.