Hidden Links - How do they help?

Are hidden pages valuable

[HagenArnold]

I found a page that is ranked #2 for a competitive phrase. They have a white on white link called "links". When you click it you are presented with a page of about 1000 links, each with a less competitive keyword phrase. And each of those links takes you to a page of keyword spam - same keyword repeated many times or built into a paragraph that is unreadable. I calculated at least 1000 pages of this. I would never consider doing this myself but I am trying to figure out if it is helping their SERPs.

Is the purpose to build "more content" to increase a domain's overall pagerank? Or is there some other benefit I dont see?

cheers

[mrguy]

Turn in a spam report to Google.

Google is not taking kindly to spammers lately and trying to get as much out as possible.

They need those reports for the ones that the filters missed.

[HagenArnold]

I am not intersted in getting them banned but to understand the benefit they seek. Since they are ranked so high with an average number of backlinks, I conclude there is some benefit. I am trying to understand if it is in the pure number of pages added to the domain that is helping them. I can't udnerstand what other benefit there is since users would surely leave immediately if they clicked on the pages of all links or repeated keywords.

Can any one lend an opinion?

[24bit]

If they don't get caught, which they should, it has huge benefits to their ranking. It's a huge topic and I don't have time to go into it. Do some research here on how links, PR, etc. works and you'll understand.

They are massively cheating, and it is your ethical responsibility as a webmaster to report the spam to Google. These people cheat, and hurt people that play by the rules. Not to mention they make the net a worthless experience.

[heini]

Hagen, if I understand that correctly, it's rather a shortcut than anything else. I don't see how this does anything else as what normal pages would do.
Imagine you have the same pages linked from the home page and then from a links page, but not with nonsense/a-keyword-here text, but with text readable for a human visitor, it would do the same for the site ranking wise. Of course that would also do much more for return visits, ROI etc.
Anyway, I doubt if this is the reason for the site to appear at #2 for that keyword.
To actually determine the effectiveness of that strategy you would perhaps try and find out if the site ranks well under the keywords targeted by the links pages.

Oh, and one thing to take into account: a page with 1000 links does not much in Google. Google stops takking links into account, when there are more than 100 or so on a page.

So all in all it doesn't look like an overly effective approach to marketing a site.