: Fake E.g. see Link Farms are potentially damaging to your SEO efforts and from Wikipedia: Search engines countered the link farm movement by identifying specific attributes associated with

Fake

E.g. see Link Farms are potentially damaging to your SEO efforts

and from Wikipedia:

Search engines countered the link farm movement by identifying
specific attributes associated with link farm pages and filtering
those pages from indexing and search results. In some cases, entire
domains were removed from the search engine indexes in order to
prevent them from influencing search results.

and from The Register Google whacks link farms

Truth

Here's some advice from the horses mouth

Make a site with a clear hierarchy and text links. Every page should be reachable from at least one static text link.
Offer a sitemap to your users with links that point to the important parts of your site. If the sitemap is larger than 100 or so links, you may want to break the sitemap into separate pages.
Create a useful, information-rich site and write pages that clearly and accurately describe your content.
Think about the words users would type to find your pages and make sure that your site actually includes those words within it.
Try to use text instead of images to display important names, content or links. The Google crawler doesn't recognise text contained in images. If you must use images for textual content, consider using the "ALT" attribute to include a few words of descriptive text.
Make sure that your elements and ALT attributes are descriptive and accurate.
Check for broken links and correct HTML.
If you decide to use dynamic pages (i.e. the URL contains a "?" character), be aware that not every search engine spider crawls dynamic pages as well as static pages. It helps to keep the parameters short and few in number.
Keep the links on a given page to a reasonable number (fewer than 100).
Review our image guidelines for best practices on publishing images.

Reality Check

Google turnover is 00000000, profit 80000000.
Google's success depends almost entirely on quality (usefulness) of search results
Google can afford to employ the best brains on the planet.
Google have the incentive and the resourcess to penalise webmasters who harm Google
by devaluing it's search results through fakery, trickery and deviousness.
Google have no incentive to make Webmasters need to employ expensive SEO services.
Google have every incentive to assist and reward webmasters who have
useful content.