a brilliant question about anchor text

or a half baked realization perhaps.
i found out the backlinks of a competitor had mostly their domain for anchor text.
ok whatever.
here is the question - can i trick google (ooooh that sounds so evil) by using the domain of the top ranking site in my anchor text instead of the domain of my client's site?
is there a penalty in being found out on that or is it kosher? how black is black and how white is white?

You can do that if you want to rank for the domain url of your competitor!! but if you want to rank for a different keyword then ranking for another sites domain url will not and make no logical sense to even consider that!! The fact that site has mostly their url as anchor text is that it is good seo practice to have a high % of your anchor text as just your own domain url and not some other sites url.

You can but it would be worthless. Using your competitors url as anchor text will only help your client site rank for your competitor's domain name, not the keyword your competitor is ranking for.

Well I guess it is possible you might start ranking for your competitors url but if there is not search volume it might not be worth it, also if I am searching for brand X and brand Y shows up #1 I would probably STILL click on brand X's url at the #2 spot.

I am not sure if this is what you are asking but thats my answer

I don't see how it would really benefit you unless the domain gets tons of searches. If that's the case, it will more than likely be a trademark. If you are targeting a trademark, that could lead to trouble.

Something to think about.

A better idea (maybe) is to build links for "yoursite.com reviews" and also build links for "competitor1 reviews" and "competitor2 reviews" Link it to your site review page. easy phrases, targeted traffic.

You won't solve anything by doing that
Depending how big is your competitors, if you want to do him some harm, blast his index with 20.000 blog comments with the main keyword. If he is on the first spot the worst case scenario is to remain there. Otherwise you can bet he will fucked real hard by big G when the need update comes.

You can make this a study case as well, see how it goes
20.000 BL are cheap and it should work ( depending on your competitor cause doing this to amazon.com won't solve anything )