I remember reading that putting "click here" in banner adverts produced better click-through rates, as sad as it may sound. I can well believe that the same is true of links, though it ruins the page for screen readers (I went on some training for this once, which advocated link text exactly like your former example, and was told that its common practise for experienced people with visual disabilities to simply listen through the list of links to more quickly navigate to the information they need).
I guess an element of that would be down to the fact that a banner and (or image, in general) doesn't necessarily look clickable without "click here". Text links should always be able to avoid that problem, though.
