engines.  Webmasters were putting unrelated search terms into their meta tags and using hidden text to try and trick the engines into bringing their site more traffic.

As you may have guessed, engines like Google have gotten much smarter over the years and are now using the "backward link" technique to help rank web pages.

Google can determine the keywords other sites are using to link to a particular site and then they use that information to help decide how a page should rank for various search words.Going back to the bowling ball example -- if you go to Google and search for "bowling balls", you'll notice that the sites that appear first aren't necessarily the ones that repeat the word "bowling balls" throughout the text.  Some of them don't even have these keywords in the title of the page.

The reason these sites show up first is because of their link popularity.  Other web sites are using "bowling balls" to describe their site and are using these keywords inside the actual hyperlinks when they link to them.

So hopefully you can see now that when you exchange links with other web sites, be sure that they include the keywords you want to rank high for in the search engines.