Do you think Link Trading is now a bad idea given G's new update?

[LD]

I read an article saying that too many 'unnatural' links will be seen as over optimization. Unnatural links being keyword anchor links, the kind that in the past had value. As a Linkspun user, this bothers me since there we set the anchor text for the link, and the same anchor gets used over and over for the link.

A more natural way might be to have different anchors, or simply use the url as an anchor as you would see in casual sharing of a link.