We've had alot of new members join recently so i thought i'd introduce the allinanchor: command in Google to you all.

What the hell is the Allinanchor command? I hear you asking.

Its simply another method of searching Google that can be very useful for SEO in at least 2 ways.

How do we carry out an allinanchor search?

Simple instead of searching Google using your keywords like 'SEO Forum'

You search like this 'allinanchor:SEO Forum'

What do these results mean?
Simply the all in anchor command tells you exactly what it says on the tin, it shows you the sites that Google thinks (knows) have the most anchor text links with your keywords contained.

In our example given this site has the 3rd most links using the keywords 'SEO Forum'

What use is this?
Look closely at the results of a regular search and an allinanchor search, what do you notice?

There is often a distinct correlation between the two sets of results. Often if your linking building your notice your site appear in the allinanchor results first and then follow awhile later in the regular results, there is nearly always a little time lag.

The second use is of course to see who your competitors are when you are starting out your link building programme.

Of course its not merely a case of building a shed load of anchor text links for one keyword, everything you do needs to appear natural to Google. A site with 100 links based around a single keyword or phrase will show in the allinanchor results but it not likely to rank highly for a regular search.

This method, is  this a white hat or a black hat SEO method?

Related SEO thread here: http://www.webproworld.com/search-engine-optimization-forum/71425-allinanchor-question.html#post389381

I've not explored allinachor (yet) but my team have been researching intitle: and inanchor: searches. Going through the returned results manually we've found them to be returning less than reliable results - about 60% accuracy (meaning 40% of returned results did not have the keywords in the title or anchor text respectively).
I'll get someone to do the same with allinachor: and report back, but I'm not optimistic.

Does allinchor need more twiking?

My hastily typed typos in the post aside, we conducted the test after meeting with a pro SEO consultant a few weeks ago who suggested we not use this method. Frankly, I was very positive about using these techniques and we had been using them for several keyword research projects. But after multiple test searches across just under 200 keywords over several niches, the results were as described above - no ifs and buts... ~40% of returned search results provided pages in the top 10 SERPs that did not include the keywords in the title or in the anchor respectively.
Searches for each xxxxx keyword were for:
intitle: xxxxx
inanchor: xxxxx
intitle:xxxxx and inanchor:xxxxx

Yes, that's what I said in my original comment...
I'll be happy to report back what my team turns up for allintitle: and allinanchor: once they've had a chance to explore them. I just did a couple of quick searches with those and allintitle: returned all accurate results, but allinanchor: did not, but that's not close to enough results to get a decent picture and weed out any anomalies.

What I was expecting was to have a list of pages where the search term appeared within anchor text on those pages. So, every page returned should have an anchor/link in the html which includes the search term. That seems a logical extrapolation of the nature of returned results from allintitle:

What you're describing is entirely different and to be honest seems less useful, nevertheless interesting for competitive research.
I appreciate the clarification.