There’s an interesting hack being in Google.co.uk results for the term 'electronic cigarette' where a black hat approach has worked to fool Google into allowing a bunch of sites to dominate the results.

It's quite an interesting blackhat approach combining techniques and relying on a few oddities at Google for it to work.

1) So every few weeks Google cycles take place with filters and 'new sites' will have penalties applied (sandbox), allowing new sites to gain a bunch of links quickly then rank very fast between these cycles

2) The sites are cloaking their results serving up different results a) for Google bots, b) for people coming directly from Google, c) for anyone going directly to their site. They are doing this because they have affiliate links which they wish to hide from Google, while the traffic coming directly from Google will see affiliate links, c) anyone going to them directly is treated suspicious so they show them a blank page saying the site is closed. "This website is no longer available.": http://fabelectroniccigarette.co.uk/ If you go there from a Google search you will see affiliate links https://www.google.com/search?q=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.fabelectron... The cache page shows Google Bot without the affiliate links http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:IhEEuWP... If you look at the cookies for the site you will see the refer link being captured wptt_referrer The back links to the site are all black hat links: http://www.black-x.de/gaestebuch.php

They are running a churn and burn system with a bunch of sites www.fabelectroniccigarette.co.uk www.electroniccigarettegold.co.uk/ www.ecigaretteco.co.uk www.superb-ecigarette.co.uk/ www.smoking-electronic-cigarette.co.uk/ www.electroniccigarettehealth.co.uk/ www.wickedelectroniccigarette.co.uk/ www.ecigswow.co.uk/ www.awsomeecigarettes.co.uk

Interesting