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Wow polluting the internet to protect your Golden Goose sites for backlinks.. I usually expect the worst but this wasn't on my radar. It seems very plausible however.

If those links don't help and are ignored by google, how do they help hide the "real" links?

> but that does NOT mean that it's helping. Most likely those links are just there to hide the...

it's not only that they don't help, they could ( and afaik used to ) damage reputation/ranking. But maybe this changed in recent years.

My understanding is that they used to damage your ranking, but then people realized that spamming links to competing sites was an easy way to improve your ranking, so Google stopped.