Is anchor text really that important? I've heard Google don't pay much attention to it anymore since all the spoof links such as "utter failure" linking to George Bush images and suchlike.

Well I am not too sure at how the search engines themselves use the anchor text for optimization and such, but it can't hurt to have text that is really good and descriptive leading to a page can it?

I mean, just think about it, in general, the anchor text should give some indication of content, and so good anchor text is going to help the search engine try and figure out a little more what the webpage is about.

In other words, I think that it still plays an important rule in helping with Search Engine Optimization, and in any event, i don't feel like it can hurt anything, so why not have good anchor text?

Yeah, I've been making the effort to try and use better anchor text in links. But this whole SEO game is very complicated.

I'm pretty sure Anchor text is one of the primary things SE use.