On the topic of Search Engine Optimization, there are many ways to “cheat” the Search engines. (Most of these ways are detectable and you will get penalized for it today, but it was a “good idea” back in the day.)
White Text on White Background: This will allow you put lots of keyword-heavy content on your page without having to bother your visitors with them.
Hard to find links: This is where you link a space ” ” or a couple letters and force it to not underline. This way you can direct the search engines to a content heavy page without showing your visitors.
All of these “cheats” will get your site penalized on the Search Engines. This is Google’s first “Quality guidelines – basic principles“:
- Make pages for users, not for search engines. Don’t deceive your users or present different content to search engines than you display to users, which is commonly referred to as “cloaking.”
(Source: http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/…)
But what about link farms?
A link farm is a system or program that links thousands of sites to your website. Since number of links to your site is one of the main things that Google and other search engines look for, It probably isnt’ a bad idea.
But note, if you get 10,000 links from sites that all have pagerank of 0, your website’s going to have the page rank of 0. So you have to be careful about which program you choose.
-Enjoy,
-Ashton Sanders