I was just checking out the website of a competitor, and I found an interesting collection of backlinks.

The competitor offers web hosting as one of their products. What they’ve done is appended some invisible text to the end of all of their hosted account’s pages. To me, this would seemingly be very unnatural linkage.

They have almost the exact anchor text from a great number of totally unrelated websites and yet they’re managing to rank in MSN and Google, even after the “spam-fighting” Jagger updates. It is very clear from these examples that Google now always puts “age before beauty”. If your website was registered in 2001 or earlier, you have carte blanche to act however you want in the engines.