Bad text Contents has always been a hassle for me. Has anyone encountered a client asking you to optimize a certain keyword that is not even written in his site content?
Yes - more frequently than I would have liked. We had one client who insisted on three keywords that were not in his content and he just would not take no for an answer. In the end, I had to rewrite his content and put the keywords in myself because my boss didn't want to risk losing this client.
They don't get away with this because they are on different class C ranges, they can do this because they have a large amount of authority and a high amount of trust due to the thousands of editorial links they have. They are also not trying to manipulate anything by doing this, but are simply linking to other sites in their network for branding purposes and to generate traffic. Try doing it on 30 new sites, regardless of IP range, and it's easily detectable and you'll get stomped on quickly. This is correct. Linking out to unrelated sites will hurt your trust. One or two won't hurt...but if you're doing it on a larger scale it will be a fairly obvious attempt at manipulation. These circles are easily detectable and leave a fairly obvious footprint. Reps from all the engines have said so numerous times. As far as being penalized for it, that goes back to the relevancy issue. If they're relevant you won't. If your wedding gown site is in three and four way link exchanges with phentermine and payday loans you're not going to last long.