Sites linking to other sites is the best way to improve your ranking correct? Yes...i believe so. If you can get lots of people to link to you, then your ranking goes up...yes. but...can people link to you without the link showing up and without using css? this idea struck me...
But how does GoogleBot (or another bot) judge as to whether a link is valid or not? It perceives the page to be a text file, and reads it as such, spiders from there. It does interpret the code slightly, in parsing, but how far does it go?
Therefore, how can google (or other) know whether or not your links are inside,
or outside, the html boundaries of your site?
after the </html> tag on your page, if you put in an <a
href=http://www.randomsite.com>random description</a> link, would google (or other) see it as a link? or is it smart enough to know its a fake?
also, if you quoted out the link, so it was within the html but
invisible to browsers, would google pick it up and credit it?

just some ideas for helping hard working guys (and gurls), get the
rankings they desire.

Google will give you a worse rank or take you out all togethor if you try to cheat them. For example, if you put invisible text to boost your rank, their bots will eventually notice and give you a bad rank. I guess it would work the same way with fake links.

AFAIK putting your link outside the boundaries of the HTML tag does not mean that it will become invisible to your visitors (really depends on the browser).

As for putting your links in comments to hide them, then it depends how you use it as to how the browsers view it. If it's just a case of hiding some internal links while you work on other sections then I don't think it's a problem - as most search engines (to the best of my knowledge) strip out the comments anyway.

Filling comments with links to other sites is not something I would recomend as I feel at best it will do nothing to help your rank, at worst you could be ignored/banned from the engines and waste your money in unnecessary data transfer. It's something I wouldn't even consider myself...

i was not considering just filling my source with links to other sites, i know this would substantially reduce my page rank as the relevance would drop as more links were added.

instead, i was hoping that if this worked, i could approach some reputable sites and "exchange invisible links," thus improving my own ranking whilst not extracting from their content and diverting traffic away from their site. i figured, if i could get spidered through these links, then my ranking would improve, but they woudln't loose traffic. and if i was relevant to their site, then i could link back, and we'd both benefit

Couldn't you just make like a million pages with your ad on it? and host it?