I don't know about links, but the phenomenon of getting results for a query like: A "B" with no B on the page has been particularly disturbing for some time. At least months, maybe longer, I can't say. I have no idea why they made a change this drastic (it is drastic when someone makes a deliberate effort to say "I need "B" in the page, it's not a whim or a random query" and the search engine shows results which violate the query _syntax_).

Yes this is true. Google will rank web pages, based on the inbound links pointing to the page, even if Google hasn't crawled the page itself.

This happens regularly when a web page is blocked from crawling via Robots.txt file. Google still indexes and ranks the page, but Google has no idea what is on the page.

Want to keep a web page out of rankings? Allow Google to crawl it (by not restricting via robots.txt), but use a NoIndex meta tag or X-Robots-Tag HTTP header to indicate that the page should not appear in search results.

Yes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_bomb

> Google bombs date back as far as 1999, when a search for "more evil than Satan himself" resulted in the Microsoft homepage as the top result.

I think so. It definitely seems like a nice shortcut to link together adjacent concepts and queries. If a page talking about a particular topic (but in a different way or with different phrasing) than the original page it could help build out a kind of list of related topics.

Yes, this was the whole point of Google, and how they beat Yahoo, etc.