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Well in the short term your website would increase in rank and increase your traffic. As time goes on though - Google would eventually see the pattern as it does with mimes and decrease, not only your pagerank, but also your domain authority as a result of the link spamming from low quality sites. The longer the page remains with low quality links and poor SEO practices, the more and more likely it is that it will be penalized or even black listed.
Does not recommend.
The tool that I use to check is an add-on for Chrome called "Page Speed"- super helpful in analyzing page load times and gives suggestions on how to fix these errors. I believe they have an add-on for Firefox as well.
As Joseph said, using a 301 redirect will not be tracked as a referral but instead will be direct. Taking over a company with many indexed pages can be time consuming but as he said, over time your authority and in links will be improved.