does a transparent 1x1 pixel image on a forum post count as a backlink?

I saw this: http://hi.baidu.com/seoexp/blog/item/ade306de3a61051562279801.html/cmtid/d5e1ae39f82755c9d4622537 and it says to put a 1x1 pixel image as a linked image back to your site. Does that count as a backlink? Since there's no alt tag how would you target the keyword?

Would google penalize you for this?

 

Easy way to get banned in search (for invisable links)

Easy way to get banned in the forum you do it in as well for link spam.

 

Not a good idea of the above reasons, or otherwise. It might be a link, but not a great link, will certainly do more harm than good.

 

Thanks, it seemed too easy.

 

Could this be used to lower page rank of the competition if the links went to them?