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Had a similar situation for a competitor site; best idea is to not get jealous over their high ranking - if they are doing something against Google rules then they will get a penalty in due time - don't resort to doing the same thing for a short term benefit, it won't work out in the long term. You can always report them if you think something is wrong. Keep at it, focus on your own work and concentrate on improving where your site where you can, but don't get distracted by any black hat tactics used by competitors or you'll just join them when the penalty hits.

I would not unless your site is about gabling or casinos as stated. I would not link out to non-relevant content.

Oups ! such shame, i mix the command up this morning ! in fact i used "link:" instead of "site:", and i have been misleading by the fact that my visits are down days after days with about 80% less than the previous month, so i tried to find a reason... Awfully sorry about that..now all the work is to find what 's happening about such drop in my visits... Many tks to you both  Barry Smith, and Jonathan Fashbaugh..

Well a bigger piece of the puzzle is probably that a LOT of the anchor text into these kind of sites is going to be that exact match phrase, so I think it's not specifically a problem being able to identify a brand will fix for every site. I agree though that Google is definitely making moves to better identify brands.