Once upon a time there was a guy who called himself "Eli" who wrote a blog post called "SEO Empire" which proposed that a person who was serious about SEO wouldn't need to go begging for links or even creating content that attracts links, but rather they could create a vast pyramid of sites that would generate PageRank out of thin air.

Such a person would make a vast number of low-quality sites that make hyperlinks to medium-quality sites that in turn would make hyperlinks to high-quality sites.

I could say the idea captivated me completely for a while. I couldn't think about work when I was at work because my mind was filled with thoughts about that sort of thing.

Unfortunately Eli's post is no longer on the web. He still has a "Blue Hat SEO" site but like too many other sites today his SSL configuration is broken. He got in a lot of trouble after he posted a neural network written in PHP that could crack CAPTCHAs. That attracted attention from Russian Hackers, the FBI, and a person who couldn't tell the difference between anime and reality.