Everything you just described falls into what both Google and Bing describe as a “link scheme.” This is essentially an effort to artificially inflate popularity in order to boost rankings.

The tactic is well known by both search engines who actively *attempt* to diminish the impact from such activities.

If detected, the most common action would be ignoring the links. Note that detection is rarely immediate so the links may help for awhile.

The next step if a case is especially egregious would be an algorithmic dampening on the site’s reputation which would further hurt performance.

The last would be a manual action which occurs when a human reviews your actions and determines that additional leverage is required on one or more pages, or the entire site. If this occurs, you will need to remove all of the links created as part of the link scheme to remedy the penalty. Overall, these are rare.

If you focus on building links to specific pages with keyword anchor text it would dramatically increase the likelihood of your link scheme being detected.

Note that search engines already know about the sites where links are easy to acquire. The links that would be the most valuable would be the ones you can’t manipulate.

Over time, links acquired naturally increase and in doing so naturally the risk increases along they way. And links also become more scarce so often people lower their standards to maintain volume. Once a pattern of manipulation is detected, often the algorithm will distrust links that perviously were helping. The effect can be a site falling off a cliff in terms of organic search performance. I’ve seen sites with manual actions where they have hundreds of thousands of problem links, that is a lot of clean up when the site crashes. Hence why you see so many expired domains with many links.

If you are acquiring links on behalf of a client for their site, it would be unethical to not explain the risks involved up front.