Page layout – If the ratio of visible text to HTML is low, the linking page may be seen as poor quality.

Impact of Bad Links

If you get penalized, it reduces your page rank, decreasing the chances that your content will be found - or, if the penalties are bad enough, you can be removed from the search index altogether.

Penalties are assigned in two ways. Google introduced its Penguin algorithm in 2012 which targeted low quality links. Sites using link-building schemes saw rankings plummet. Since then Google has refined the algorithm making it better at catching and penalizing bad links.