It is Getting Harder to be Fake

For a long time it was easy to be fake. You could find a few non-competitive markets, buy a decent domain name, buy a custom site design, do good research, get a few good links here or there, etc...but it is getting much harder to do that today.

Savvy webmasters are rarely interested in link exchanges with new anonymous sites (especially because they have been getting bombarded with link trade requests for years), webmasters who own sites that have AdSense on them tell you that they won't sell links, and if you buy too many link based advertisements or do other things that fall outside the norm you risk your site getting nuked for being too aggressive.

As more people get online you have to connect with or influence more people to achieve the same goals. Each connection takes both time and money. Buying a half dozen trusted on topic links could be a couple day project, whereas a smartly launched content as marketing idea could garner hundreds of natural organic links faster, cheaper, and with less risk.

People manipulate search engines because they are trying to get around creating what the engines want. The goal of search engines is not to make manipulation impossible, but to make the cost and complexity of manipulation prohibitive to where it is cheaper to rank by winning the hearts and minds of other webmasters.

Search engines show you some data points (like PageRank) but they don't show you which votes don't count, if they are using phrased based semantic relationships, how old sites or links are, how fast things have grown, etc. etc. etc. As relevancy criteria moves to things you can't see it is going to be hard to be fake and amass enough trust to rank without tripping over some filter or penalty.